The 1929 Sino-Soviet War Read online

  The 1929 Sino-Soviet War

  MODERN WAR STUDIES

  Theodore A. Wilson

  General Editor

  Raymond Callahan

  Jacob W. Kipp

  Allan R. Millett

  Carol Reardon

  Dennis Showalter

  David R. Stone

  James H. Willbanks

  Series Editors

  The 1929

  Sino-Soviet War

  The War Nobody Knew

  Michael M. Walker

  © 2017 by the University Press of Kansas

  All rights reserved

  Published by the University Press of Kansas (Lawrence, Kansas 66045), which was organized by the Kansas Board of Regents and is operated and funded by Emporia State University, Fort Hays State University, Kansas State University, Pittsburg State University, the University of Kansas, and Wichita State University

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Walker, Michael M. (Colonel), author.

  Title: The 1929 Sino-Soviet war : the war nobody knew / Michael M. Walker.

  Description: Lawrence, Kansas : University Press of Kansas, [2016] | Series:

  Modern war studies | Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2016051187

  ISBN 9780700623754 (cloth : alkaline paper)

  ISBN 9780700623761 (ebook)

  Subjects: LCSH: China—Foreign relations—Soviet Union. | Soviet Union—Foreign relations—China. | Chinese Eastern Railway—History. | Joint ventures—History—20th century. | Limited war—History—20th century. | Borderlands—China—History—20th century. | Borderlands—Soviet Union—History—20th century. | Manchuria (China) —History, Military—20th century. | Zhang, Xueliang, 1901–2001. | Soviet Union. Raboche-Krest’ianskaia Krasnaia Armiia—History. | Soviet Union Raboche-Krest’ianskaia Krasnaia Armiia.

  Osobaian krasnoznamennaia dal’nevostochnaia armiia—History.

  Classification: LCC DS775.8 .w3853 2016 | DDC 951.04/2—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016051187.

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data is available.

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  The paper used in this publication is recycled and contains 30 percent postconsumer waste. It is acid free and meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials z39.48-1992.

  To the soldiers of both sides and especially those who

  fought, suffered, and died in a long forgotten war.

  Contents

  Acknowledgments

  A Note on Transliteration

  Abbreviations

  Introduction

  PART ONE. CREATING CONFLICT: THE CHINESE EASTERN RAILROAD

  1. The Troubled Frontier

  2. The Northeast Evolving: The 1911 Revolution and the Great War

  3. Talks, Wars, and Railroads (1919‒1924)

  4. Warlordism in Decay, CER Troubles, and the Northern Expedition

  PART TWO. CRISIS AND WAR

  5. The Rise of Chang Hsueh-liang and the Coming CER Crisis

  6. The Chinese and Soviet Russian Forces

  7. The CER Incident and War

  8. Renewed Talks, Fighting, and Frustration

  9. The Decisive ODVA Offensive

  10. The 1929 Conflict and Interwar Warfare

  11. A War of Consequences

  Appendices

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  Acknowledgments

  No history book is the product of one individual. That is especially true in this case, and this book only adds one more stepping-stone to a path begun by others, notably Felix Patrikeeff, Bruce Elleman, and the late Peter Tang. Research is the heart of history, and a number of people played key roles in that process, earning my lasting gratitude and appreciation. Three in particular are Asada Masafumi of Tohoku University, who generously compiled a master list of Japanese sources on the 1929 Sino-Soviet conflict; Maochun Miles Yu of the US Naval Academy, who forwarded Chiang Kai-shek’s August 1929 national address on the CER crisis and brought to my attention the compilation of papers by Chinese scholars presented in Guo Shenjun’s The Chinese Eastern Railway and the Chinese Eastern Railway Crisis; and Michael Carlson of the National Archives and Records Administration, who helped greatly in gaining access to restricted military intelligence and Office of Naval Intelligence documents.

  More than any other individual, David Glantz made this book a reality. Not only did he help in locating the lion’s share of the Russian-language sources that got the ball rolling, but he also provided unstinting help and guidance from the inception of this project to its completion. Deep thanks are also due to the military history master’s program faculty (especially John M. Jennings of the US Air Force Academy) and the library staff at Norwich University, whose support made possible the thesis that formed the nucleus of this book. The staff at the University Press of Kansas also provided wonderful assistance. The sustained professional assistance from my dear friends, Tim Benbow of King’s College London Defence Studies Department, Wayne Downing, and my brother, Joseph D. Walker Jr., proved invaluable, and needless to say, there would be no book without my wife, Megumi, who stood by my side throughout this endeavor.

  A Note on Transliteration

  For transliteration of Russian proper nouns, a simplified Library of Congress system has been used except for commonly known names. In the case of Chinese proper nouns, Wade-Giles has been selected for two reasons. First, it better reflects the historic period, and second, primary sources often proved impervious to Pinyin conversions. Many English-language sources lacked needed diacritics, while both Russianand Japanese-language transliterations ended in Wade-Giles, making it the viable option. As an aid, Appendix B matches known pinyin placenames with their Wade-Giles versions.

  Abbreviations

  CCP Chinese Communist Party

  CEC Central Executive Committee

  CER Chinese Eastern Railroad

  CLC Chinese Labor Corps

  CMNA Commissariat for Military and Naval Affairs

  Comintern Communist International

  FD Frontier Defense

  FER Far East Republic

  GPU State Political Directorate

  IARC Inter-Allied Railway Committee

  IJA Imperial Japanese Army

  KMT Kuomintang (Nationalist Party)

  NEFDF Northeast Frontier Defense Force

  NRA National Revolutionary Army

  NWFDA Northwest Frontier Defense Army

  ODVA Special Far East Army

  OKDVA Special Red Banner Far Eastern Army

  PRA People’s Revolutionary Army

  PUR [Political Administration of the] Red Army

  RKKA Workers’ and Peasants’ Red Army

  RMC Revolutionary Military Council

  RRSC Russian Railway Service Corps

  SMR South Manchuria Railway

  TSRR Trans-Siberian Railroad

  WPA War Participation Army

  The 1929 Sino-Soviet War

  Introduction

  The 1929 Sino-Soviet conflict was a short and bloody war fought over the jointly operated Chinese Eastern Railroad in China’s Northeast between two powers mostly relegated to the dustbin of history, the Republic of China and the Union of Soviet Socialists Republics.1 A modern limited war, it proved to be the largest military clash between China and a Western power ever fought on Chinese soil. Over 300,000 soldiers, sailors, and aviators served in the war, although only a part participated in the heavy fighting. As a comparison, at the outset of the bett
er-known 1924 Second Fengtien–Chihli War, Chang Tso-lin, the supreme Manchurian warlord, advanced with three armies formed around eleven mixed brigades. In 1929, his son, the Young Marshal Chang Hsueh-liang, arrayed sixteen mixed brigades against the Red Army, the bulk of his army.

  The conflict was the first major combat test of the reformed Soviet Red Army—one organized along the latest professional lines—and ended with the mobilization and deployment of 156,000 troops to the Manchurian border. Combining the active-duty strength of the Red Army and border guards with the call-up of the Far East reserves, approximately one in five Soviet soldiers was sent to the frontier—the largest Red Army combat force fielded between the Russian civil war (1917–1922) and the Soviet Union’s entry into World War II on 17 September 1939. The 1929 conflict also offered an important look into warfare during the interwar in areas ranging from strategy and tactics to technology. The war is historic.2

  Because the conflict is absent from many histories dealing with East Asia, scholars have not framed the war by degrees of significance but by extremes ending in insignificance. Jonathan D. Spence did not mention the war in his highly praised In Search for Modern China, nor did Nicholas Riasanovsky in his widely used History of Russia. James Sheridan gave it but one sentence in two separate works.3 Unfortunately, this list is both long and impressive. Even scholars who focus on Chinese military history disagree over the war’s significance. Bruce A. Elleman, writing in 2001, devoted a chapter to the conflict in Modern Chinese Warfare, 1795–1989, while Peter Worthing did not give the war a word of mention in his 2007 Military History of Modern China: From the Manchu Conquest to Tian’anmen Square.

  This leads to a telling point: military history is important in in own right, and how the 1929 war has been dealt with to date serves as a cautionary tale for historians. While the presentation may be unattractive, as compilation of forces, orders of battle, and tactical analyses are often seen as stale relics of old school military history, the confused, even misguided place of the 1929 war in today’s historical debate shows what can happen when, to use Benjamin Cooling’s phrase, “traditional drum and trumpet operational history” is jumped over so quickly as to miss its significance.4 The aim of this work is to try to correct that error by presenting the first extensive treatment of the war and to help resolve the significance controversy by addressing three questions: Why did the political crisis over the CER break out into open warfare? Why was the Soviet Red Army able to decisively defeat the Chinese after a few weeks of fighting? Finally, what were the consequences?

  Using Russian, Chinese, and Japanese sources as well as declassified US military intelligence reports, the conclusion is that the war destabilized the region’s balance of power and altered East Asian history. A path to war was created when Chiang Kai-shek and Chang Hsuehliang miscalculated, both diplomatically and militarily, as they viewed the Soviets as politically isolated and militarily weak and were convinced that the time was right to reassert full authority over the CER. For the Soviets, Stalin dominated the action, and he saw war, not negotiations, as the preferred option. Once Stalin approved the large-scale offensive, the Soviet Red Army unexpectedly scored a decisive victory, disproving the assumption that it was incapable of fighting a modern war. With first-rate military doctrine, it possessed the ability to execute fast-paced successive operations and rapidly defeated the determined but divided and unevenly led Chinese forces. This led to significant political repercussions: the Kellogg–Briand Pact or Paris Pact for the outlawry of war failed, the Soviet Union emerged a recognized military power in East Asia, causing Japan to reorient its military policy away from the United States and toward Northeastern China and Soviet Russia, and China was forced to accept the reality that it could not militarily confront either of its two regional rivals, curtailing Nanking’s militantly aggressive path in regaining full sovereignty.

  Telling this story creates a unique set of problems. As noted, the history of the 1929 Sino-Soviet war is often overlooked, and much of it fits within another obscure subject, the early twentieth-century military history of Northeast Asia. Beyond the 1904–1905 Russo-Japanese War, only the history of the Soviet Red Army in this region has attracted interest, but again, the role of the 1929 war has received scant attention. To help address what Felix Patrikeeff referred to as a “lacunae in our understanding” of this conflict, the book is divided into two parts.5

  Part I is background. Chapter 1 begins with the 1929 situation in the Northeast, and the chapter’s second half, along with chapters 2 to 4, addresses the causes of the war and provides a military-political history of the CER in Northeast Asia within the context of larger historical events that shaped the region’s history. For subject matter experts, these chapters are optional. The latter half of Chapter 1 addresses the period from the Boxer Uprising to the eve of the 1911 Revolution. The Northeast’s military history from 1911 until 1918, from the dawn of the Republic of China, the 1917 Russian Revolution, and through the World War I is the focus of Chapter 2. The next chapter deals with the period 1919–1924, which saw the rebirth of China’s revolutionary movement, international attempts to sustain peace and stability in East Asia, China’s further decay into warlordism, and the arrival of the Soviet Union on the Northwest’s frontier. The final chapter in Part I explores the changes in the Northeast in the wake of the Second Fengtien–Chihli War and ends in the reunification of China after the Northern Expedition. The role of the CER, the 1929 war’s object, is interwoven throughout the chapters. Given the subject’s obscurity, by integrating both the Chinese and Russian military history of the region during the 1900–1928 period, these chapters should prove usefully informative to a wide audience and provide needed understanding of the causes of the 1929 Sino-Soviet conflict.

  The war is the focus of Part II. Part II covers the 1929 war and its consequences and consists of seven chapters. Chapter 5 addresses the rise of Chang Hsueh-liang as the hegemon of the Northeast in 1928, his submission to the Kuomintang regime in Nanking, and the events leading directly to the 1929 crisis and war. An overview of the Chinese and Soviet armies is provided in Chapter 6, while the 1929 Sino-Soviet conflict is covered in detail in the next three chapters, demonstrating that the war was of significant historical importance. Chapter 10 offers a military analysis of a war fought at the midway point between the two world wars, and the final chapter concludes with a discussion of the conflict’s consequences—consequences that often have not been given their due place in the historical discourse.

  Part One

  Creating Conflict:

  The Chinese Eastern Railroad

  1 | The Troubled Frontier

  Background

  Few places in the 1920s captured the public imagination like Manchuria. For outsiders, it appeared to be the ideal land for dreamers, adventurers, and romantics. As Junichi Saga, a Japanese soldier who served on the Korean–Manchurian border in the 1920s, recounted, “There was a feeling in Japan in those days that anything was possible if you went to Manchuria.”1 Businessmen from America and British bankers eagerly sought out their chance to make their mark in the booming economy. The land, especially the northern regions, also held the allure of the American Wild West of the nineteenth century, where trappers could make a small fortune selling furs, outlaws and bandit gangs hid in remote hideouts, prospectors panned for alluvial gold along remote streams and rivers, and bears and Siberian tigers still ruled parts of the forested wilderness. For the large majority of people, however, a more routine yet rewarding life was spent in the cities, villages, and farms. The region remained, as South Manchuria Railway (SMR) officials described it, a “land of opportunities.”2

  Some 940,000 square kilometers in size, larger than France and Germany combined, it was the home to nearly one tenth of China’s population, over 30 million people, including 1 million seasonal workers, known as sparrows, who annually migrated from China’s northern provinces, especially Shantung. While it boasted of one of Asia’s largest multiethnic comm
unities—there were some 2,900,000 Manchus, 350,000 Mongols, half a million ethnic Koreans, 200,000 Japanese, and 141,000 Russians—it was also a magnet for refugees and misfits, as nearly one fourth of the Russian population had arrived in the Northeast during the 1917–1922 Russian civil war, while the number of bandits was put at an astounding 58,000 in 1929.3

  The Northeast in 1929 could be seen to begin at the southernmost tip of the Liaotung Peninsula on the small Kwantung Peninsula containing the port city of Dairen and then extending up the Liao River north toward Mukden, the first capital of the Manchu Empire (See Map 1 for an overview of the Northeast.) This was the region’s economic heart; only the Shanghai metropolis surpassed its concentration of industries and manufacturing plants. Moving northward, the land stretched out into the Central or Tsitsihar Plain, the richest and fastest-growing agricultural region in China. The Greater Khingan Mountains bounded the western edge of the plain; continuing west through mountains, the Northeast then opened onto the plateau of flat marshes and grasslands of northernmost Inner Mongolia until it reached the Argun River and the Soviet border. To the east of the Tsitsihar Plain lay the Yalu River, the Tunghua Mountains, and Tumen River, which together (from south to north) formed the boundary with Japanese-controlled Korea. Continuing north, the plain abutted Lake Khanka with the Ussuri River and the eastern border with Soviet Russia. From the Tsitsihar plain to the north lay the great Amur River basin, the most coveted piece of terrain in Asia—a region that China, Russia, and Japan all wished to dominate.

  Troubles along the Amur River began as soon as Cossack expeditions loyal to Tsar Alexis I first reached its banks in the mid-1600s and the river became a flash point between the native Manchus and Russians until the 1689 Nerchinsk treaty delineated a border between the two empires. The treaty served to keep the peace for the next 170 years and helped to define what came to known as Manchuria in the 1920s. The notable exception was Manchu control over the Amur River watershed, which ended with the 1858 Aigun treaty, when the Russians were able to force a prostate Ch’ing China—having been defeated by the British and French in the Second Opium or Arrow War—to cede to Russia all lands east of the Ussuri and north of the Amur River. The Amur was also known as the Heilungkiang, or Black Dragon River. The river basin remained politically charged. Not only was the area contested over by the Chinese and Russian empires, but the Black Dragon Society became the name adopted by Japan’s first ultraimperialist association in 1901—a group that urged expansion onto the Northeastern Asian mainland. The arrival of Japan completed the triad of powers that would fight politically, militarily, and economically to control Manchuria during the opening decades of the twentieth century.4