Newsgroup: it.cultura.storia.militare
Titolo: scontri tra sovietici e giapponesi nel 1939

Sto leggendo "Pearl Harbour" di Peter Herde, un testo su come e perchè il
Giappone entrò in guerra.
L'autore, in uno dei capitoli iniziali, parla di pesanti scontri alla
frontiera Mongola contro i sovietici nel 1939 - parla di scontri a livello
Divisionale, da cui i giapponesi uscirono malconci e che, secondo lui,
impressionarono i Comandi dell'esercito giapponese sulle reali capacità
dell' Armata Rossa. I quali, in seguito, furono condizionati anche da questi
fatti nello scegliere tra i 2 obiettivi strategici del giappone: l'attacco a
nord contro la Siberia in appoggio all'alleato tedesco che avanzava verso
oriente (caldeggiato da Hitler e Ribbentropp) o l'attacco a sud/sud-est
contro le potenze occidentali.
Qualcuno sa indicarmi dove reperire informazioni su questi scontri di
frontiera (link, libri, ecc.)?
Saluti a tutti
Gian Marco Morelli

 ha scritto nel messaggio
news:9l7ssj$u9$2...@nreadB.inwind.it...

Ciao.
Non furono solo le considerazioni di carattere militare, ma sopratutto
quelle di carattere economico, visto che, in quel momento,  il Giappone non
riteneva conveniente espandersi verso la Siberia ( che forse considerava a
sua disposizione, da prendere in un secondo tempo). Era indispensabile
porre una sicura mano su Filippine, Malesia, Indonesia ecc, per poi porre
il discorso sul controllo del Pacifico. Le Hawaii e le isole Marshall erano
punti chiave.-
Infatti non dubito che i Giappo si sono resi conto che se l' Armata Rossa
era dura l' esercito Americano lo era di più. Rischiare per rischiare
cercavano di porre una base sicura sul Pacifico, contando  sul fatto che l'
America era ben più lontana della Russia.-
Ciao.-
--
_______________
Contro la stupidità degli uomini gli stessi Dei lottano invano.-
                                                   - Schiller -
_______________
Marco Fausto
http://www.marcofausto.net
_______________

betasom wrote:

Sulle motivazioni strategiche Giapponesi e Sovietiche ti consiglio caldamente di
leggerti Richard Overy "The Road to War" .
E' un libro in cui sono illustrate tutte le mosse politiche, diplomatiche,
economiche eccetera dei principali paesi della Seconda guerra mondiale dal
1918   fino allo scoppio della guerra .
Per quanto riguarda le operazioni militari (accennate in questo libro) forse ti
conviene cercare, se non ricordo male, le memorie di Zhukov che sicuramente
tratteranno anche della guerra sovietico-giapponese del 1939.
Per il link consiglio di fare una capatina a questo sito dedicato al maresciallo
Zhukov ( 
http://web.mitsi.com/zhukov/
 ) da cui ho tratto il testo che segue e
che riguarda il tema del subject. Ovviamente nel sito troverai anche altro
materiale sulle battaglie a cui ha egli ha preso parte.
Ciao,
Sergio
--------------------------------------------------------------
 
http://web.mitsi.com/zhukov/Russo.htm
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
     this was so, despite the USSR's efforts to expand both its rail and road
links in the region:
     Despite the great efforts made to remedy the situation and the marked
progress that was achieved, the Soviet Far East still depended on
     European Russia for such stable commodities as grain, oil, iron ore and
steel.
     A Japanese intelligence report to the Imperial General Headquarters placed
a finger on additional weaknesses:
     Operations vary according to the state of locomotives, the degree of skill
of the railway engineers, the availability, in these vast expanses,
     of coal and water, and other factors.
     Imperial headquarters' mistake, and the Kwantung Army command's mistake,
was to judge Stalin's caution and forbearance to be
     weakness. After the signing of the Anti-Comintern Pact, Stalin was alarmed
at the possibility of the USSR being involved in a two-front war.
     He was shuffling his cards. When in July 1938, the Kwantung Army struck
again, attacking troops of the Red Russian Independent Eastern
     Army in a hilly area, Zhanggufeng, on the eastern border of Manchukuo,
close to Korea, they were stopped in their tracks. Instead of
     pondering their failure, the Kwantung Army commanders "dismissed the
reverse as 'forty percent of a victory' won in a difficult sector".
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
     In April 1939 the 23rd Division of the Kwantung Army moved to a new target,
Outer Mongolia; with orders to cross into Nomonhan, a
     deserted and disputed sector on the Manchukuo-Korean-Mongolian border.
Japanese tanks, infantry and cavalry directed fierce attacks
     into this zone from May to July 1939, but were repulsed at all times by the
defenders. Operations, on the Khalkan-Gol river, intensified
     rapidly. From May, Soviet bombers attacked into Manchukuo and Japanese
bombers retaliated. The greatest air battles yet seen were
     taking place, with formations of 150-200 war planes deployed. Soviet
anti-aircraft fire was highly effective and the Japanese airforce
     barely held its own.
     Concerned at a possible threat to the Trans-Siberian Railway occasioned by
these expanded hostilities, the Soviet Defence Ministry
     dispatched to the sector its ablest commander, Lieutenant-General Georgi
Zhukov, later a Marshal of the USSR and Stalin's most
     renowned commander in the German war. Zhukov arrived in June 1939. He
arrived to find that the Kwantung Army had secured some vital
     high ground and quickly concluded his need for reinforcements. Before
August 1939 he had acquired 550 front line aircraft, 500
     state-of-the-art T34 tanks, twenty cavalry squadrons and thirty-five
infantry battalions. He outnumbered the Kwantung Army three to two in
     infantry, by three squadrons in cavalry, and possessed a qualitative edge
in armour. But above all, his army was to show a marked
     superiority in intelligence analysis, command, control and communication.
     One of the first commanders to use radio signals intelligence to advantage,
Zhukov sowed misinformation with the Japanese by
     broadcasting fictitious command orders, ciphered in codes he knew the
Japanese could break. He led the Kwantung Army to believe that
     he intended only defensive measures. Richard Sorge, a Soviet agent of
German-Russian parentage, the press attaché to the German
     embassy in Tokyo, also assisted, by providing Zhukov with the Japanese
order of battle.
     The commanders of the Red Army and the Mongolian forces were well trained
and as blooded in battle as were the Japanese. The
     Mongolian General Choibalson, and Zhukov's Chief of Staff, General Shtern,
were superior field officers. Zuhkov's control of preparations
     for the critical battle was copybook. His battalion and squadron commanders
were not made aware that an offensive action was planned
     until three hours before the units moved out. The Kwantung Army had been
misled, and many Japanese officers were away from their units
     at the time of the attack. A German style communications network assured
tight control throughout the battle.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
     The Red Army's surprise assault began on 20 August 1939, with a thrust
across the border into western Manchukuo. Zhukov's blitzkreig
     combination of armour, artillery, air support, and infantry, broke new
ground. A Red Army lightning assault pre-dated the German blitzkreig
     into Poland by thirty-three days. Captain D.W. Phillis' description of the
attack properly identifies the ingredients of a momentous, but
     largely forgotten, battle:
     He launched concentrated air, artillery and armour assaults along the
enemy's whole front with the main armoured thrust going to the flank.
     As a result he was able to encircle the whole army, and settle down to a
battle of annihilation, grinding the enemy by continuous assault.
     At the battle of Khalkin-Gol (sometimes called the Battle of the River
Halka, or by the Japanese the Nomonhan incident), Zhukov's force
     wiped out the Japanese 23rd Division, killing 18,000 Japanese troops. The
Red Army and its Mongolian ally then demonstrated its
     absolute command of the battle by penetrating thirty kilometres further and
stopping at the Manchurian frontier.
     Russia's air fleet was equally successful. Soviet airforce tactics were
superior to the Japanese, with tighter and better controlled air
     formations, that refused to be tempted into individual dogfights. The
Russians employed aerial rockets in this battle, for the first time in air
     warfare.
     The Japanese Kwantung Army commander was now more than ready for a
cease-fire, and in Tokyo Japanís political leaders hoped that
     the Soviet government would be content with a re-drawing of the disputed
borders. The war had embarrassed Japan in many ways.
     Beside a military defeat, where 18,000 of Japan's 60,000 battle force were
killed, and probably another 20,000 wounded, the imperial
     family was mortified by the desertion of Lieutenant Higashikuni, the
twenty-three-year-old son of Prince Higashikuni, during the fight, a
     matter suppressed by Japanís censors.13 Stalin was also happy to call it a
day. Zhukov withdrew his force to the Manchurian border on 31
     August 1939 and received orders to immediately move his heavy armour to the
railhead, for rail transport to Poland. The USSR's slowness
     in biting off its slice of defeated Poland, a delay of fourteen days, can
be explained by Stalin's concern to close hostilities in the east before
     moving militarily in the west.
     Hitler's Nazi-Soviet Pact of 23 August 1939, seen by the Japanese
government as a betrayal of the anti-Comintern Pact, reinforced
     Japan's decision to use Hitler but never to trust him. The Nazi-Soviet pact
was announced during a Japanese military disaster. This
     combination required a revision by Japan of its policy to the USSR.
Hostilities ended officially on 16 September 1939 with handshaking
     and photographs of the commanders. A commission was set in place to re-draw
the vexed boundaries. Japan decided that it was not yet
     ready for an all-out war with the Soviet Union and on 13 April 1941 the
Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact was signed, with Japan unaware
     that Hitler would reverse his arrangement with the USSR and launch the
Wehrmacht on Operation Barbarossa in June 1941.
     The Nomonhan incident and the preceding borderland fights on the contested
Mongolian-Manchurian borders, confirmed that in 1938 and
     1939 the "Go North" strategy was highly favoured by elements of the
Japanese army. Why then, with Germany invaded by the USSR in
     June 1941, did Japan not then seize the day and mount an invasion of the
Soviet eastern republics? On 28 March 1941 the German
     foreign minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, persuaded Count Oshima, the
Japanese ambassador in Berlin, of the merit of joint action to
     deliver "a crushing blow" on the USSR. Germany sought a Japanese attack on
Vladivostok, and into the USSR's central Asiatic republic.
     Tokyo was not interested.
     While the Japanese foreign minister, Matsuoka Yosuke favoured a "Go North"
thrust, most civil and military leaders in Tokyo advocated
     caution. With the Soviet Union now within the Anglo-American camp, albeit
with the United States in non-belligerent status, Japan risked
     attack by the Russians in Manchuria and by the United States at sea. A two
front war was undesirable, and likely to be calamitous. The
     Soviets were well deployed on Manchuria's border, and had shown their
determination to fight. In mid-1941 the "Go South" strategy won
     preference with Japan to secure its needed resources in the south,
diplomatically if possible. The Kwantung Army's pride was salved by a
     reminder that once Japan had secured its goal in the south the contest with
the USSR could then be resumed. In any case, it was better to
     wait until Germany had broken the Red Army and taken Moscow.


Le considerazioni economiche, certamente ebbero un peso, dato che a
differenza di quelle delle isole del sud, le risorse della Siberia non erano
immediatamente sfruttabili. Ma daltra parte, il Giappone era molto più forte
in mare che in terra. Contro la flotta americana, poteva sperare almeno per
un certo tempo di pareggiare i conti, ma con i T34 sovietici, i giapponesi
avrebbero potuto ben poco.
Ciao
Tex