The 1929 Sino-Soviet War Read online

  On 6 September, Lieutenant General Dean I. Subbotich and his deputy, Major General Nikolai Fleischer, arrived in Port Arthur with a force of 7,000 soldiers, having sailed halfway around the world after leaving the Black Sea port of Odessa. With sufficient forces now on hand, the pace of operations increased. On 21 September, a little over two weeks later, Alekseyev, with 9,000 troops, launched the final offensive. The last major clash of the war took place three days later at Anshan, the future iron-mining center, which ended in a decisive victory for the Russians. The provincial capital of Mukden surrendered on 1 October without a fight. A few days later, Admiral Alekseyev and General Grodekov’s troops joined forces at the Teihling rail station, effectively ending the war. After the initial Chinese raids that destroyed much of the CER, the conduct of the 1900 war in the Northeast proved to be a military anachronism as both armies, with the exception of the widespread use of modern rifles and artillery, fought a Napoleonic war: troops and horses were fed largely through foraging and were supplied by wagon trains; opposing sides formed lines facing each other; cannon fired directly at an enemy arrayed in plain sight; cavalry charged with sabers; and massed infantry dominated set-piece battles. While mopping-up operations continued over the next few weeks, the Russian conquest of the Northeast was complete. The next question to be decided in St. Petersburg was, what was to be done with this vast land?44

  To end the conflict, the Boxer Protocol was signed in Peking on 7 September 1901. It added greater protections for foreigners in China and was backed up with the right to station foreign troops in Northern China and prohibit the presence of Chinese troops near the legations in Peking and Tientsin. Additionally, an indemnity was included—a financial punishment intended to both recover the cost of damages and to fiscally constrain the Ch’ing government. The thirty-nine-year indemnity was so onerous that the United States thought it could possibly bankrupt China. Because the Boxer Uprising had expanded into a war over the CER in the Northeast, the settlement between Russia and China moved beyond the Boxer Protocol. This is not to say that the Russians did not benefit greatly from the Peking settlement; they were to receive the largest share of indemnity, nearly 30 percent of the total. However, the Russians had more demands to make over the Northeast. For some of the tsar’s senior military leaders, the solution was outright annexation into the Russian Empire.

  As early as August 1900, after the conquest of Teheiho and Aigun, General Gribsky unilaterally declared the Amur region part of the Russian Empire. Grodekov, his commander, echoed the same sentiment when he declared, “After hard fighting, we have taken possession of the right bank, thus consolidating the great enterprise of annexing the whole of the Amur to Russia’s dominions.” War Minister Alexei N. Kuropatkin enthusiastically supported the idea of a Russian “Trans-Amur District,” the region between the CER and Amur River. Several months later, in March 1901, Vice Admiral Alekseyev argued for Russia to authorize an open-ended occupation of not just the northern Amur region but all of Manchuria, using the defense of the CER as his rationale. Not everyone agreed with the annexation plans: Witte was strongly opposed, and even Alekseyev acknowledged that a deal with Japan over Korea had to be in place if the annexation was to succeed. In the absence of a consensus, high-level discussions of outright annexation of all or part of the Northeast continued into the summer. Peking attempted to thwart the designs, fully realizing that the 1900 Russian victory represented a further weakening of Ch’ing authority within their Manchu homeland. Further, the tsar’s commanders on the scene were pushing their military advantage at the local level as well.45

  First, Admiral Alekseyev unilaterally created a set of “Provisional Rules of Transfer for Fengtien Province” and coerced Governor-General Tseng-chi to sign them, even though they made the province a virtual colony of Russia. Next, St. Petersburg, using Chief Engineer Yugovich as a proxy, drafted the July 1901 “Kirin and Heilungkiang Convention,” which was forced on the two provincial governor-generals. The agreements not only expanded Russian authority but also allowed the CER to develop and operate coal mines within fifteen kilometers of the rail lines in those two provinces, most notably the Dalainor mines in the far western reaches of Heilungkiang. The Kirin governor-general was also charged with creating a Department of Foreign and Railway Affairs at Harbin. He compliantly appointed Sung Hsiao-lion to the post. Militarily, the Russians excluded Chinese forces from the CER Zone, to include the Russian section of Harbin while permitting the CER guard corps, which had fought well during the war, to be significantly enlarged. The corps were renamed the Trans-Amur District Border Guards Special Corps in 1903. General Chichagov, who had led one of Grodekov’s columns during the Boxer Uprising, took command. By 1904, on the eve of the Russo-Japanese War, the rail guard had expanded nearly sixfold, from under 4,500 troops in 1900 to just over 24,000, including infantry, cavalry, and artillery formations, all wearing new and unmistakably Russian military uniforms. Additionally, a Russian Amur River flotilla had been created, while the Chinese were barred from having men-of-wars on the Amur, Ussuri, and Sungari rivers. The Russian flotilla became one of the most powerful riverine forces in the world with the arrival of eight Typhoon class armored monitors in late 1910.46

  Alarmed at the Russian attempt to sidestep Peking by negotiating directly with the Chinese governors, Peking effectively fought back: they refused to recognize the Fengtien transfer rules (a document that met with disapproval even in St. Petersburg), delayed the approval of the Kirin-Heilungkiang Convention, and pushed off a scheme championed by Witte that would have made the Russo-Chinese Bank the dominant financial institution in the Northeast. When Tsar Nicholas finally ruled out annexation in the face of Peking’s resistance, the way to the 8 April 1902 Chinese-Russian Agreement was opened. Peking fared less well in regaining full control over the three Northeastern provinces. Despite Russia’s pledge to return the region to Chinese administration, the tsar’s troops remained, taking advantage of the conditions for their withdrawal written into the 1902 agreement: any “actions of other Powers” or “disturbance” could be used to justify a halt. At the close of 1903, all of Manchuria, save the small region abutting the Yingkow treaty port, remained under occupation by the Russian army. The Russians later gained the power to veto future Manchurian concessions offered to other powers or their citizens for mines or other interests and the construction of new railways. Peking’s efforts to rein in the growing economic power of the CER also met with limited success: they restricted Russian control of mines developed beyond the fifteen-kilometer boundary and limited CER administration to the Dalainor coal mine, but the CER began a process of unrestrained exploitation of economic resources within the zone.47

  The Chinese defeat had been felt hard within the ranks of its military in the Northeast. Virtually every regular army unit had been destroyed in battle, creating a power vacuum that was often filled by former soldiers and bandits; indeed, the two were often indistinguishable. One method the Ch’ing authorities used to rein in the bandits was to subvert them by granting amnesty with semiofficial status. One of the bandit leaders to take advantage was Chang Tso-lin, a young man in his midtwenties, a natural leader and the father of a three-year-old son, Hsueh-liang. He caught the eye of a local Manchu official, who won over Chang’s loyalty by giving him command of a local garrison in Fengtien. For a man of Chang’s abilities and ambitions, the timing was ideal. By 1904, the province became a focus of the Army Reorganization Commission, directed by Yuan Shih-kai, and within a few years, Chang Tso-lin was an up-and-coming figure within the Fengtien provincial forces. The term “Peiyang” (North Ocean) originated with the Ch’ing military reorganization in the 1880s when a foreign invasion along the lines of the Opium Wars was seen as the main threat. The plan had been to create two fleets, a Peiyang Fleet based at Weihaiwei and Lüshun (Port Arthur) with a Nanyang (South Ocean) Fleet at Foochow, each to be teamed with an army and a smaller riverine flotilla. By 1900, the Peiyang Fleet was still replacing the losses incurred during the Sino-Japanese War, the Nanyang Fleet badly needed modernization, and a southern army had never been formed. When the Boxer Uprising began, Yuan Shih-kai and his Newly Created Army were in the Shantung suppressing Boxers, and he refused imperial orders to attack the Allied forces, sparing his force. During the reorganization, the Newly Created Army evolved into the Peiyang Army, the only credible military force in the years immediately after 1900.48

  The 1900 Russo-Chinese War revealed some painful truths to China and Russia. It offered an abject lesson on the mixed benefits gained through the CER, as they had come with a heavy price in both blood and treasure, and no amount of either on either’s part seemed enough to pay the bill. One irony was that the CER had been built to cement a Sino-Russian military alliance aimed at rebuffing Japanese advances on the Northeast Asia mainland, but once the Boxer Uprising began, it instead became the focus of a war that left the local Chinese army in tatters, the railway in ruins, the Russian army in a position of regional supremacy, and a Japan that was undeterred in confronting the new and dangerous threat posed by Russia. The seeds of the next war had been sown, and Russia was about to learn the lesson of imperial overreach with Japan. Undeterred by the war, St. Petersburg continued to make the Northeast the center of its activities in the Far East. In the years after the Boxer Uprising, economic investment there outpaced the Priamur District, it was also home to more Russian soldiers, and to remove any ambiguity, when Nicholas established the Far Eastern Viceroyalty in 1903, he made Port Arthur the capital, not Khabarovsk, and placed Alekseyev, an admiral, in charge.49

  This aggressive East Asia policy drove Japan to promptly resolve its rivalry with Russia over Korea. When the tsar adopted an unyielding negotiations stance, Japan came to see war as the only solution. Foreign minister Komura Jutaro, like Witte before him, noted in June 1903 that Russian military power stemming from a Manchuria traversed by the CER was of great importance. However, unlike Witte, he saw it as a mortal threat to Japan’s interests in Korea. Railroads like the CER came to dominate military planning in Europe, America, and East Asia during the close of the nineteenth century because they allowed for the transfer of troops, equipment, and materials in quantities, all delivered at speeds unthinkable in an earlier age. The Japanese were as alarmed as the Chinese at the failure of the Russian army to leave the Northeast. They concluded that because the Chinese military was impotent in the years after the Boxer Uprising, the substantial Russian army and naval forces in the Northeast had to be directed at Japan. Where St. Petersburg sought to delay negotiations over the Korea question as an effective tactic while expanding Russian military might in response to perceived unreadiness, the Japanese increasingly saw them as examples of Russian duplicity and even deceit.50

  The 1904–1905 Russo-Japanese War

  To the Meiji leaders in Tokyo, that Russia appeared bent on dominating East Asia through force proved the wisdom of a war policy. The Triple Intervention had made clear to Japan the need for a European ally to preclude having to face alone a coalition of powers and the building of an army and navy able to fight and win a war against a Western power in East Asia. With the signing of the 1902 Anglo-Japanese alliance, the first goal had been met. By 1904, the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) had been increased by six divisions to a total of thirteen, while the navy had grown from a combined fleet built around four dated capital ships to one possessing ten, with six modern, first-rate battleships, all of which had entered service in the last seven years. When the tsar failed to make meaningful concessions over Korea during close of 1903, Japan prepared for war. The ability to transport men and matériel along the CER quickly drew the attention of military planners on both sides. Earlier in June, the Russians successfully transported two brigades to the Far East, an impressive demonstration of the railway’s military value. The Japanese officers concluded the CER could carry eight Russian military trains a day, matching their ability to supply their forces by ship, whereas War Minister Kuropatkin, during a 28 December conference with the tsar in St. Petersburg, saw danger in relying on a single line of supply—the CER—to deploy and sustain large forces in southern Manchuria. The Russians opted to delay negotiations with Japan once again, convinced that time was on their side, while the Japanese mobilized. When Tokyo’s final offer, issued on 13 January, met with an unfavorable response, war broke out in February 1904.51

  On the ground, the 1904–1905 Russo-Japanese War was fought almost entirely in the Northeast, commencing in May, when General Kuroki Tamemoto’s 1st Army crossed the Yalu River from Korea near Antung and defeated General Sassulitch’s along with the bulk of his 2nd Siberian Corps. From that time until the war’s end after the Japanese victory at Mukden in March 1905, the Japanese never lost the initiative on the battlefield. After Kuroki’s victory on the Yalu, the 2nd Army under General Oku Yasukata landed on the Liaotung Peninsula, splitting the Russian forces. A corps under General Anatoly M. Stoessel was cut off by June and besieged in Port Arthur by August, while the remainder of the army was arrayed between the Korean frontier and Mukden. The CER and SMR proved indispensable, but as Kuropatkin—now the senior commander in the Northeast—predicted, the railways were unable to sustain large mobile Russian forces in southern Manchuria, and a lack of local coal supplies further hampered his operations.52

  Japan continued to build up its forces. Kuroki was joined by the 3rd Army under General Nogi Maresuke, forcing Kuropatkin to gradually fall back along the SMR, his essential line of communication. By midfall, Stoessel stubbornly held out at Port Arthur, while Kuropatkin had been defeated in two major battles (at Liaoyang in September and along the Shao River in October). Both sides’ exhaustion forced a temporary end to the major campaigning, but the war was moving unalterably in Japan’s favor. On 1 January 1905, Port Arthur fell to Nogi’s badly bloodied 3rd Army, while the decisive land battle of the war at Mukden ended in defeat for Russia in March. Kuropatkin was relived of command shortly afterward, and when the Russian Baltic fleet was destroyed in the battle of the Tsushima Straits in late May, any hope of Russian victory disappeared. By mid-June, St. Petersburg requested an armistice, but Tokyo declined to accept until peace negotiations began on 1 August under the good offices of the United States at the Portsmouth naval yard. The war was over, but at a terrible cost for both sides: the Japanese saw approximately 60,000 killed in action with another 20,000 dying from disease and close to a quarter million wounded, while the Russian casualties easily exceeded those totals.53

  Leading Chinese generals like Yuan Shih-kai could only observe at a distance—not that there was a rush to invoke the 1896 military alliance and come to Russia’s aid. In some quarters in Peking, there were arguments to walk away from Russia entirely and seek an alliance with Japan, although the idea never gained traction. When war came in 1904, the loose language of the alliance requiring China to commit “forces of which they can dispose at that moment” allowed the Chinese military, still recovering from the losses suffered during the Boxer Uprising, to refrain from direct involvement. Yuan made it clear to his superiors that he commanded a mere twenty thousand soldiers—one-tenth the number available at the start of the Sino-Japanese War nearly a decade earlier. Being a secret alliance in an era of secret diplomacy further played into the hands of a reticent court in Peking; there was little that the Russians could have done to compel the Chinese to enter the war on their behalf even if the tsar desired it, which was not the case.54

  The war offered insights into the military advances and geopolitics that reshaped not only the future of East Asia but also warfare of that era. Militarily, the clash in the Northeast signified how easy it was slide into a devastating conflict, given the manner the Powers approached war making through bilateral diplomatic ultimatum. The war also represented a quantum leap over that of the Boxer Uprising, as the fighting bore little resemblance to the small-scale combat of that war. It is worth noting, however, that most of the senior Russian officers of 1900 proved capable in fighting the Japanese four years later, and usually at the head of much larger forces, even though Kuropatkin and Alekseyev emerged with tarnished records. In the earlier conflict, no Russian column exceeded 20,000 troops. Every major clash of 1904–1905 exceeded that number; several involved hundreds of thousands of men, and the Russians suffered thousands of casualties, routinely exceeding the total losses of the 1900 war in a single day. Tactically, advances in individual weapons redefined the lethality of war as both rate of fire and range increased, while smokeless rifle cartridges not only improved the ability of soldiers to conceal their firing positions but also removed blinding clouds of smoke, allowing for the better acquisition of targets. The introduction of trench lines protected by barbed wire, rapid-firing cannon, machine guns, and massed infantry formations made the ground a killing field. A young Japanese officer, Sakurai Tadayoshi, described the carnage after a Port Arthur battle: “Dead bodies . . . dyed with dark purple blood, their faces blue, their eyelids swollen, their hair clotted with blood and dust . . . no one dared to go near.”55 The cumulative effect of these innovations contributed to a horror that would be further expanded beginning nine years later, with the outbreak of World War I.56