Stalin's General (12 page)

As early as August 30 the Soviet government was celebrating the victory at Khalkhin-Gol. A statement published in the Defense Commissariat newspaper,
Krasnaya Zvezda
(Red Star), and other Soviet newspapers, announced that Zhukov, Shtern, and thirty-one other participants in the battle had been made Heroes of the Soviet Union—the USSR's highest honor. Yet it was Shtern's name that headed the list of awards and citations, not Zhukov's:

The published order of merit has led some to speculate that perhaps Shtern had more to do with the victory at Khalkhin-Gol than posterity has been led to believe. The explanation is probably much simpler: Shtern was the senior (and better-known) of the two officers and the writers of the government communiqué may not have been aware of the operational independence given to Zhukov by the General Staff.

Shtern did, indeed, play a central role in the preparation of the August offensive but its chief organizer and executor was Zhukov. During the battle he was left to make his own decisions, which is not surprising given the speed with which the offensive developed and succeeded in achieving its operational goals. Zhukov later claimed that on the third day of the offensive Shtern had come to him and proposed the attack should be paused for two to three days to regroup and resupply before continuing the encirclement of the Japanese. In Zhukov's telling he put it bluntly to Shtern that if he was being given advice that was one thing, but if he was being giving an order he would appeal to Moscow over Shtern's head. Needless to say, Shtern backed down and Zhukov continued with his attack.
¹⁸
Maybe some such incident did take place but more important is that the story reflects the general tensions between Zhukov and Shtern generated by the unusual command arrangements put in place by the General Staff. Zhukov was Shtern's junior and it was natural the senior officer would resent being excluded from critical command decisions. Tensions between the two men would surface again at the High Command conference in December 1940 when the lessons of Khalkhin-Gol for contemporary warfare were discussed.
¹⁹

As the battle came to a close on August 28 Zhukov started writing a letter to his wife, which he finished on September 1:

Not sure that his wife received this letter, Zhukov wrote to her again in the middle of September: “I am alive and well. You must know from the TASS report about the battle on the Mongolian-Manchurian border. Now you understand why I had to leave Smolensk so urgently. You must also know from the TASS report that the Japanese Samurai have been destroyed, in the air as well as on the land.… During the action I felt very good. In short, just like during the civil war.”
²¹

Stiff and formal and displaying little real affection, these letters are typical of Zhukov's correspondence with his first wife. This is not so surprising given the context and conditions under which Zhukov wrote. High-ranking Soviet citizens like Zhukov were expected to have political commitments, not personal feelings, and could assume their private letters were subject to scrutiny by the security services. But their correspondence was not devoid of personal content and could reveal preferences within a prescribed framework. In Zhukov's case it is clear that he liked to be where the action was, which was to become a recurring theme of his wartime correspondence with his family.

Zhukov's victory at Khalkhin-Gol has been almost universally admired as a tactical masterstroke and as a classic example of a combined arms operation that demonstrated both the power and speed of
modern mechanized forces. In his monumental study of the battle Alvin D. Coox entitled his chapter on the Soviet summer offensive “Forging a Second Cannae: Zhukov's Masterpiece, August 1939.”
²²
William J. Spahr, another American military historian, agreed with this evaluation: “Zhukov had executed a Cannae, a successful double envelopment, on the dry steppes of Mongolia on a battlefield 74 kilometers wide and 20 kilometers deep almost 2,000 years after Hannibal destroyed the Roman army of Terentius Varro.”
²³
High praise, indeed, considering that Hannibal's success at Cannae is seen as one of the greatest battlefield victories in history, an example of a pincer movement encirclement that generals the world over have aspired to emulate ever since, even though the Punic Wars were eventually won by Rome not Carthage.

The battle of Khalkhin-Gol is also credited with being a key moment in Zhukov's maturation as an operational commander. According to an American biographer, Otto Preston Chaney, for example,

This is all true. But only up to a point. As we have seen, Zhukov was far from being the sole author of the victory at Khalkhin-Gol, which was a result of the collective effort by himself and his staff, by Shtern's Front Group, and by the General Staff in Moscow. The command
traits he displayed were commendable but, surely, were those that all good generals aspire to. Moreover, it is always easier to perform well against an inferior enemy, especially when you win. Zhukov's real test as a commander was yet to come: keeping his composure in the face of massive defeats by the Germans in summer 1941, an opponent far superior to the underequipped and old-fashioned Kwantung Army.

More important was Khalkhin-Gol's personal and psychological significance for Zhukov. He had performed brilliantly and been given credit for a great victory—the Red Army's first since the civil war. It was also a victory viewed by the Soviets as suitable revenge for Russia's humiliating defeat in the 1904–1905 Russo-Japanese War. Zhukov's self-confidence and inner self-belief were immeasurably enhanced. From now on he would have peers among his fellow generals but no superiors.

A hint of the personal transformation that Zhukov experienced as a result of Khalkhin-Gol comes through in the journalist Konstantin Simonov's account of his first meeting with him. Simonov arrived at Khalkhin-Gol soon after the battle had concluded. Together with a group of Soviet journalists he went to see Zhukov in his dugout. Zhukov sat in the corner behind a small table. “He must have only just returned from the bath,” recalled Simonov, “rosy-cheeked, sweating and without a shirt, his yellow tunic was tucked into his flannel breeches. Of low height and with his wide chest bursting through his tunic, he seemed very big and broad.” When an intelligence officer came in with a report, Zhukov looked at the officer angrily and said: “Regarding six divisions, it is nonsense: we have established there are only two. The rest are nonsense.” Turning to the journalists he said, “That's how they earn their living.” When the officer asked if he could go, Zhukov told him: “Go. Tell them over there not to fantasize. If you have blank spots be honest about them and let them remain blank spots and don't feed me nonexistent Japanese divisions in their place.” When the officer had left Zhukov repeated: “That's how they earn their living. Intelligence officers.”
²⁵
It is difficult to imagine the Zhukov of an earlier vintage behaving so frankly and confidently in front of an audience of journalists.

A decade later Simonov wrote a novel about Khalkhin-Gol—
Comrades
in Arms
—which featured an unnamed “Commander” of the Soviet forces. Simonov always insisted this was a fictional character, but his portrait of a stern but energetic and effective commander was recognizably Zhukov.
²⁶

Zhukov's growing self-confidence was also reflected in a long report on Khalkhin-Gol to Shaposhnikov in November 1939. The report began with a severe critique of Feklenko and his “criminal” failure to prepare adequately for battle with the Japanese; later in the report Feklenko was described as an “enemy of the people.” A lot of the report was devoted to the crucial role tanks had played in defeating the Kwantung Army. But Zhukov also drew attention to some drawbacks. It was difficult to direct actions of tanks because of a lack of information and poor battlefield communications. The absence of infantry support for tanks had allowed the Japanese to withdraw in some cases. Inadequate intelligence had resulted in failure to deploy reserves to maintain the encirclement of enemy forces. Zhukov was also critical of the air force, especially during the first phase of the battle. Units had not been prepared for group battle, there was no coordination of the actions of different types of planes, and there was a failure to study enemy air tactics. These caveats notwithstanding, Zhukov's overall conclusion was very positive: “at Khalkhin-Gol in the period 20–31 August the forces of the RKKA [Workers' and Peasants' Red Army] and the MNR [People's Republic of Mongolia] conducted the most complex of contemporary operations—and succeeded in winning a victory which, in our view, should be carefully studied by all commanders.”
²⁷

The political impact on the Japanese of their defeat at Khalkhin-Gol was to strengthen advocates of a “Southern Strategy” for Japan. This held that Japan would be better advised to expand into Southeast Asia and the Pacific rather than become bogged down in a difficult war with the Soviets in Siberia. This tendency in Japanese policy was reinforced by the signature of the Nazi-Soviet pact on August 23, 1939, and the rapid emergence of a Soviet-German alliance in Europe—dashing dreams of a joint German-Japanese war against the USSR. Zhukov did not know it but he had helped set Japan down the path to the Pearl Harbor attack in December 1941. When the Nazi-Soviet pact broke down and the Germans did attack the Soviet Union
in summer 1941 the Japanese reconsidered the “Northern Strategy”—completion of the conquest of China combined with an attack on the USSR—but by this time Japan was locked into a power struggle with the Americans in the Far East and too committed to the Southern Strategy.

After the battle Zhukov moved to the Mongolian capital of Ulan Bator, where the 1st Army group was headquartered, and was joined by his family. There he languished for the next nine months. One reason for this unexpectedly long sojourn in Mongolia was that Soviet-Japanese armistice negotiations dragged on for months. A truce was agreed in September 1939 but Shtern and Zhukov were then charged with negotiating the details of the frontier with the Japanese. Not until June 1940 was agreement reached.