So I've wanted to do a second version of this for a while after I started to dislike the way the first was going. Now with a few days off I'm going to have another crack at it. So, without further ado:
A STORM IN THE EAST
It was perhaps not all that surprising that the Soviet Union and Japan often butted heads in the borderlands between the Soviet client state of Mongolia and the Japanese puppet state of Manchukuo. Tensions between the two had been high for decades, and had erupted into open conflict on a number of occasions. Japan had decisively defeated Tsarist Russia in the Russo-Japanese war of 1905, and had occupied Vladivostock for several years during the Russian civil war. Both for historical, regional and ideological reasons, it was hardly nay surprise that both the Japanese and the Soviet Union despised one another.
After the Russo-Japanese War, the Russian Empire had been the lesser concern of the Japanese. Dominated by internal corruption and revolution, the Russians had never seemed a credible threat for an expanding empire, concerned with the United States and the European imperialist powers to it's south and east and the lumbering giant of China to it's west. However, by the 1930s, the Soviet Union was a resurgent power, and had become a major regional rival to the Japanese. Under Stalin the Red Army had enjoyed high military spending and by 1938 had began to match Japanese troops in terms of numbers and outnumber them in armour. The purges of many of the more competent areas of the Soviet officer corps, had led to the Soviets strength being dismissed by the European powers. The Japanese High Command, on the other hand, were particularly concerned about the threat Soviet submarines posed to Japanese shipping, and the ease with which Soviet bombers, operating out of Vladivostok, would be able to reach Tokyo. The Japanese wished to remove this threat by from the Soviets the port of Vladivostok, minimising their strength in the Far East. The Soviets, wishing to redeem their humiliating defeat in the Russo-Japanese War and protect their only warm water port, were not going to encourage the Japanese to make another attempt at expansion into Siberia, but if they did, they would make sure it would not be a successful one.
Due to these factors. The hotly disputed border between Mongolia and Manchukuo was hotly disputed had led to violent skirmishes more than once. The Manchukoan puppet had claimed that the border ran along the Khalkhin-Gol river, whereas the Mongolians argued that the border actually ran just east of Nomonhan village.
The most notable of these shirmishes had been the battle for Lake Khasan in North Eastern China. The conflict started on July 15, 1938, when the Japanese attaché in Moscow demanded the removal of Soviet border troops from the Bezymyannaya Hills to the west of Lake Khasan in the south of Primorye, not far from Vladivostok, claiming thiswas Japanese. The demand was promptly rejected. The Japanese attacked on July 1938, forcing Soviet troops to retreat, bringing the Japanese close to Vladivostock. Too close for Joseph Stalin. However under the command of the chief of the Far East Front, Vasily Blücher, additional forces were moved to the zone of conflict and after several brutal engagements the Japanese forces were repulsed. The Japanese prime minister was sent humiliated to the United States to negotiate peace peace.
Soviet soldiers on Zaozyornaya Hill.
Although the Japanese had been soundly whipped the small skirmishes continued. However the Soviets had greater concerns in Europe and whilst they were confident they could defeat the Japanese on their own soil, a war against a major power in the far east did not seem particularly feasible, or desirable. Lake Khasan was hoped by both sides to be a one off failure in communications and that no other large scale engagements would take place.
But merely 7 months later the skirmishes would get severely out of hand once more, when a few Mongolian cavalrymen would unwittingly change history...