AHC: Westerners or Chinese deal a "Nomonhan" to militarist 1930s Japan

raharris1973

Gone Fishin'
Donor
Monthly Donor
To recap, by a "Nomonhan" I am referring to the limited but high-
intensity battle which the Japanese and Soviets fought over a disputed
strip of the Mongolian-Manchurian border.

The clash was escalated by local Japanese forces, without the backing
of Tokyo (like many actions of the Japanese military), but since the
Japanese were defeated and it demonstrated major Soviet superiority in
weapons and tactics, it resulted in Japan subsequently being very
cautious against the Soviet Union, and it resulted in Tokyo pulling
the leash of the Kwangtung army to head-off further clashes, which
Tokyo did not do in other instances of rogue Army operations that
turned out to be successful.


In essence, the Soviets, by decisively winning a clash, managed to
bolster anti-Japanese deterrence enormously, while keeping the
conflict contained (until it happened to be more convenient for the
USSR to go to war in 1945, but that is neither here nor there).


Your challenge, should you choose to accept it, is to engineer a
plausible point of departure and chain of events that could generate a
Japanese clash and defeat at the hands of one of its other WWII
opponents, that has the effect of indefintely deterring further
aggressive action against that opponent.


Obviously, the nature of any such clash, land, sea or air, would vary
depending on the environment in which it took place.


Also, it would probably be a big challenge to duplicate the political-
diplomatic-PR factors that enabled the Nomonhan clash to be
contained. In OTL the Soviet Union and Tokyo had the advantage of
being able to cloak their test of strength in secrecy, which prevented
domestic demand to get even from spurring an escalatory spiral.


So, can we get a clash where Chinese beat the Japanese with the result
that they back off?


Can we have a strictly limited Japanese clash with the British,
Americans, French or Dutch which results in a Japanese defeat and post-
conflict caution?
 

raharris1973

Gone Fishin'
Donor
Monthly Donor
It is harder to have a Nomonhan w/ a western democracy

The western ally with the most serious ground force near adjacent to China theater in the pre-WWII would have been France, with its colonial forces in Indochina. Perhaps some clashes could occur on the French Indochina - China border between units of the French garrison and an aggressive Japanese force, where the French artillery superiority helps give the intruding Japanese force a bloody nose. France's problem of course is that for any anti-Japanese deterrent it establishes to survive, it needs to remain unconquered in Europe.
 
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