The end of the fighting at Lake Khasan

At noon local time on 11 August 1938 a ceasefire came into force, ending the fighting at Lake Khasan, where the borders of the USSR, Manchukuo and Korea met. It had been agreed in Moscow the day before by the Japanese ambassador, Mamoru Shigemitsu, and the People’s Commissar for Foreign Affairs, Maxim Litvinov. The firing finally died away at around 1.30 p.m. After two weeks of fighting, which had begun on 29 July with a clash over Bezymyannaya Hill, the Red Army, after heavy losses, was back on the disputed hills of Zaozyornaya and Bezymyannaya, and Japan agreed to end the conflict on terms close to the Soviet ones. It is often said, in short, that in August the USSR won the battle of Lake Khasan. That is true in a political sense, but the picture on the battlefield was more complicated.

The last days of fighting

On the night of 30–31 July the Japanese 19th Division took both hills and began to fortify them. Moscow regarded this as the seizure of Soviet territory. On 31 July the People’s Commissar for Defence, Kliment Voroshilov, placed the 1st Maritime Army and the Pacific Fleet on alert, and the chief of staff of the Far Eastern Front, Grigory Shtern, and the deputy commissar for defence, Lev Mekhlis, arrived on the scene. On 1 August Joseph Stalin, in a conversation over the telegraph, asked the front commander, Marshal Vasily Blyukher, whether he “really has any desire to fight the Japanese”. Blyukher arrived at Posyet on 2 August and threw the 40th Rifle Division into the attack, with orders not to cross the border. The assault, through marshes and the narrow defiles between the lake and the hills, without reconnaissance or proper artillery support, broke down with heavy losses.

By 4 August the 32nd Rifle Division, the 2nd Mechanised Brigade and corps artillery had reached the lake, combined into the 39th Rifle Corps under Shtern, who in effect took over the direction of the operation. On the afternoon of 6 August, once the fog had lifted, more than two hundred Soviet aircraft, including TB-3 heavy bombers, bombed the Japanese positions, and after an artillery preparation the infantry and tanks went in: the 32nd Division against Bezymyannaya from the north, the 40th Division against Zaozyornaya from the south-east. The Japanese, who on orders from Tokyo did not use aircraft, defended themselves in trenches on the ridge and counter-attacked at night. The T-26 and BT tanks bogged down in the marshes and fell victim to anti-tank guns. According to Soviet sources, a red banner was planted on the summit of Zaozyornaya as early as the evening of 6 August, and by 8 August the hill was in Soviet hands, but the fighting for the ridge and the Japanese counter-attacks continued. According to Japanese sources, Japanese units held part of the summit to the end; according to Soviet ones, the hills had been cleared by 9 August, although some Russian sources admit that Bezymyannaya was fully taken only on 11–12 August, after the ceasefire.

The ceasefire

The commander of the 19th Division, General Kamezō Suetaka, reported on 10 August that his division was on the verge of exhaustion and asked for talks to begin quickly. Tokyo had no intention of sending reinforcements: the army was just preparing the offensive on Wuhan, and Emperor Hirohito had already refused permission to use force in July. On 10 August Shigemitsu proposed to Litvinov that the fighting be halted. It was agreed that operations would cease at noon on 11 August, Maritime time, and that the troops of both sides would remain on the lines they held at midnight on 10–11 August. The details were to be settled by the commanders on the spot.

On the evening of 11 August Colonel Isamu Chō, commander of the 74th Infantry Regiment, for the Japanese side and Shtern for the Soviet side met on Zaozyornaya. On 12 and 13 August the two sides exchanged the bodies of the fallen and established the positions of their troops. Soon afterwards the Japanese units withdrew from the ridge and Soviet border guards occupied both hills. The border remained where the Soviets had drawn it, and the boundary commission that had been envisaged never changed this.

Who won

Soviet propaganda proclaimed a great victory. More than six and a half thousand participants in the fighting received orders and medals, 26 of them the title of Hero of the Soviet Union, and the 40th Rifle Division was awarded the Order of Lenin. Songs and films about the “heroes of Khasan” were remembered in the USSR for decades. In a political sense the USSR did achieve its aim: the hills stayed in its hands, and Japan withdrew.

The cost, however, was very high. According to Soviet figures published in 1993, the Red Army lost 792 killed and missing and 3,279 wounded and sick; more recent Russian tallies give around 960 killed, died of wounds or disease, and missing. The Japanese General Staff counted 526 killed and missing and 913 wounded. The Soviets had a several-fold numerical superiority, hundreds of tanks and aircraft against a single Japanese division without air support, and yet suffered losses several times greater. That is why some historians, Polish ones among them, speak rather of an indecisive clash or of a tactical success for the Japanese, who held their positions for two weeks with much smaller forces. The two assessments can be reconciled: the Japanese defended themselves well, but it was Japan that gave up further fighting for the disputed hills.

The fall of Blyukher

Moscow looked for culprits. On 31 August 1938 the Main Military Council of the Red Army, meeting with Stalin and Vyacheslav Molotov present, found that the Far Eastern Front was “poorly prepared for war” and laid the blame on Blyukher. He was reproached for the July commission on Zaozyornaya, for the chaos in command and for having failed to “purge the front of enemies of the people”. By an order of 4 September he was recalled, and the front was dissolved and divided into two independent armies. On 22 October 1938 Blyukher was arrested in Sochi, and on 9 November he died in a Moscow prison after repeated, brutal interrogations. He was one of the last great victims of the Great Purge. Shtern took command of one of the armies formed from the dissolved front, in 1939 he led the group of Soviet forces in the Far East during the fighting at Khalkhin Gol, and in October 1941 he was shot by the NKVD without trial.

Lessons learned and not learned

For the Red Army, Khasan was a painful test: it exposed poor command, weak cooperation between infantry, tanks and artillery, and a supply system that depended on a single road. Some of these lessons were put to use a year later. The Japanese army, for its part, concluded that the Soviets did not intend to fight for Manchuria, since they had contented themselves with recovering two hills. That conviction made it easier to decide on the offensive against Wuhan in the autumn of 1938. The Kwantung Army, moreover, told itself that the heavy losses had been suffered by the less highly regarded Korean Army, and saw no reason to change its own methods.

A year later, in May 1939, on the Khalkhin Gol river on the border between Manchukuo and Mongolia, the Kwantung Army started a clash on a much larger scale and was crushed by Soviet forces under Georgy Zhukov. That defeat, together with the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, convinced Tokyo that the road north was closed. In April 1941 Japan signed a neutrality pact with the USSR and turned its expansion southwards, towards the European colonies and the United States. After the war the fighting at Lake Khasan was included in the indictment before the International Military Tribunal for the Far East, which found it to have been a war of aggression waged by Japan.