(7) SOVIET-JAPANESE WAR

(11 MAY – 16 SEPTEMBER 1939 / 8 AUGUST – 2 SEPTEMBER 1945)

 

It has always struck me as somewhat anomalous that two of the major combatants of the Second World War, the Soviet Union and Imperial Japan, scrupulously avoided fighting each other for almost all the conflict, despite being on opposing sides and despite it obviously being to the detriment of Japan’s ally Germany.

Not that, on the latter point (and according to my reading), Germany particularly sought out Japanese involvement in its war against the Soviet Union – at least not until Germany’s initial victories began to wane to the point that Germany considered it might need Japanese involvement after all, by which point it was too little too late.

Hence Japan signed the Japanese-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact on 13 April 1941, a little over two months before Germany invaded the Soviet Union – reflecting how little Germany had coordinated with or even informed Japan with respect to its intentions. Hence also the term scrupulously I used for the Soviet Union and Japan avoiding fighting each other – scrupulously that is, in terms of abiding by the Non-Aggression Pact.

And as I stated before, despite that scrupulousness on Japan’s part obviously being to the detriment of Japan’s ally Germany – reflected in, among other things, about half of American Lend-Lease aid to the Soviet Union in the war against Germany being shipped through the Pacific, as long as the ships had Russian flags (which I anticipate would simply have been a matter of lending them those ships or assigning ships Russian flags).

It’s even more anomalous when one considers the long-standing Japanese hostility to the Soviet Union – and indeed the Russian empire before that, Japan’s first European military adversary. Japan had both the largest and longest military intervention in the Russian Civil War, which persisted until Japan finally withdrew from Siberia and the Russian Pacific Far East in 1922.

The initial target of the rise of Japanese militarism in the 1930s was also the Soviet Union – outside of course the Japanese annexation of Manchuria, from which Japanese militarists began looking towards the Soviet Union – before that particular party of militarists was suppressed by other militarists looking towards China and elsewhere, although that didn’t stop repeated minor clashes with the Soviet Union on the Manchurian border or in Mongolia.

One can see why the Soviet Union stuck scrupulously to the Japanese-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact in its existential struggle against Germany, but less so for Japan. One factor was of course that both the navy and Japan’s need for resources, particularly oil, advocated the “Southern Strategy” against European Asian colonies (and the United States) as opposed to the “Northern Strategy” (against the Soviet Union) that was the contending strategy proposed, typically by the army, in war councils.

The other factor was the healthy respect that Japan had for the Soviet forces opposing them – something I share in terms of my uncertainly whether any Japanese involvement against the Soviet Union in 1941, when it was most optimal for Japan (and Germany), would have actually made any different to the outcome.

That respect arose from the first of the Soviet-Japanese wars that did occur during the Second World War, interestingly enough with those two wars bookending the main conflict at start and finish.

Indeed, the first Soviet-Japanese war commenced six months before the commencement of the war in Europe with the German invasion of Poland and indeed continued for a fortnight or so into the European war. However, it was kept mostly secret by both combatants – the Soviet Union presumably to avoid undermining its position against Germany and Japan because its army was soundly defeated by that of the Soviet Union, notably at Khalkhin Gol.

The Japanese defeat in this war, particularly at Khalkhin Gol, has taken on some notoriety in history since the Second World War – rightly so in my opinion, as having an importance on the outcome of events in the Second World War that were somewhat obscured by its secrecy at the time. In some ways, it is a pity that it wasn’t publicized more widely – as it, and Japanese intelligence on the strength of Soviet forces, might otherwise had some impact on German decisions, at least if the latter had been in the minds of more rational actors.

The other Soviet-Japanese war bookend came at the end of the Second World War, after Germany had surrendered – and in the form of the Soviet Union honoring its promise to the United States to commit to war against Japan. Ironically – and somewhat incredibly – Japan at this time harbored delusions that, consistent with the Japanese-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, the Soviets could help Japan negotiate a more lenient peace.

Instead, the Soviets scrapped the Pact and absolutely smashed Japan’s Kwangtung Army in Manchuria – indeed proceeding into Korea and Japan’s northernmost island possessions.

While the Japanese army had previously romped through China in the absence of the latter’s industrial capacity and hence armored forces, now it faced the Soviet army – pretty much defined by its armored forces or tanks – honed to perfection fighting and winning against Germany.

As the War Nerd (Gary Brecher) colorfully observed in a column on this war – “This was a campaign between two great empires—both gone now, it occurs to me—but one, the Soviet, was at the absolute top of its game, and the other, Imperial Japan, was dying and insane.”

 

RATING: 4 STARS****

A-TIER (TOP TIER)

 

 

(6) FOURTH PARTITION OF POLAND / POLISH WAR

(1 SEPTEMBER 1939 – 8 MAY 1945)

 

The invasion and partition of Poland by Germany and the Soviet Union – in accordance with the Nazi-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, which as popular historian Paul Johnson pointed out was something of a misnomer for what was more accurately a Nazi-Soviet aggression pact against Poland.

Speaking of Paul Johnson, he records an interesting vignette of how easy it was to forget Poland as casus belli of the European war. One guest swept his arm around at a London society wedding on 10 January 1946 to exclaim “After all, this is what we have been fighting for”, only for a female guest to retort “What, are they all Poles?”

And indeed, the invasion of Poland by Germany on 1 September 1939 was the commencement of the Second World War in Europe. The Soviet invasion followed on 17 September 1939, effectively to claim the Polish territory assigned to it under the Pact which in turn reclaimed the territory lost to Poland in the Polish-Soviet War of 1919-1921. But for the Pact, Germany could readily have occupied all of pre-war Poland. As it was, Poland ceased to exist as a state – and alone among the states occupied by Germany, did not have its own collaborationist government but instead the German-administered General Government.

The title of Fourth Partition of Poland is used by some historians in reference to the Three Polish Partitions – the three partitions of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth from 1772 to 1795 by Russia, Prussia and Austria that progressively reduced the Commonwealth until it was eliminated as a state altogether by the third partition and completely divided up among the three partitioning parties.

However, other historians have pointed out that it might well be reckoned the sixth or even higher numbered partition – depending on how one reckons the subsequent restoration of Poland under Napoleon in 1807 and its partitions in 1815 (Congress of Vienna), 1832, 1846, 1848, and 1918 (Treaty of Brest-Litovsk).

I have classed the Fourth Partition of Poland as one of my top ten Second World Wars – indeed in top tier – as the German (and Soviet) war against Poland continued throughout the Second World War, albeit behind other active fronts, particularly in Poland itself behind the Eastern Front.

Active military fronts that is – Poland itself was the front line (or ground zero) of the war Germany fought against the populations of the nations it occupied, above all the Holocaust with it mostly occurring in camps in Poland and Polish Jews representing about half the tally for the Jewish population of Europe killed.

Of course, the most active part of the German war against Poland was its original campaign in September 1939 – which one book title christened as The War Hitler Won, and as H.P. Willmott observed in The Great Crusade, was a war Germany won before a single shot was fired due to its material and positional superiority over Polish forces.

The German victory still surprised observers at the time as being a matter of weeks rather than months. Poland might have had better prospects if weather – General Mud – had been more on its side, if its defense had been better planned or timed, and above all if Britain and France had properly planned or coordinated an offensive against Germany on the Western Front. The failure of the last has been considered as part of the larger Western Betrayal argued by Poles and Czechs from Munich to Yalta.

Even so, Polish forces defended Poland impressively – notably inflicting a similar proportion of casualties (for German personnel killed in action) as the French did in far better defensive circumstances the following year. That was despite the Soviet invasion on 17 September transforming the Polish situation from hopeless to completely hopeless – although as H.P. Willmott points out, it did little to change the military situation in reality other than to remove the Polish option of holding out in the so-called Romanian Bridgehead. As it was, some Polish forces held out even after the fall of Warsaw on 28 September, enduring until the last of them surrendered on 6 October, while others fled or escaped.

However, the war did not end there, either for Polish armed forces or in Poland itself.

With respect to the former, those Polish armed forces that managed to escape or flee continued fighting in Allied forces elsewhere (or in resistance within Poland), particularly as the Polish Armed Forces in the West, led by the Polish government-in-exile based first in France and then in Britain. Indeed, “Polish armed forces were the fourth largest Allied forces in Europe after the Soviet Union, the United States and Britain”, albeit reliant on arms and supplies from other allies.

Among the western allies, Poles served with distinction – perhaps the most famous examples being Polish airmen in the Battle of Britain and the Poles as the Allied “shock troops” in the Battle of Monte Cassino. The Polish navy and merchant marine also fought in the Polish Armed Forces in the West.

After the German invasion of the Soviet Union, the Soviets either released Polish personnel to serve in the Polish Armed Forces in the West or had them raise the Polish Armed Forces in the East, the latter more to Soviet ideological taste.

Arguably even more impactful was the Polish contribution to Allied intelligence. Apparently almost half “of all reports received by the British secret services from continental Europe in between 1939 and 1945 came from Polish sources” – and the Polish intelligence network described as “the only allied intelligence assets on the Continent” (after the French surrender).

Most impactful of all was the vital Polish intelligence contribution towards the decryption of the German Enigma codes, delivered to the western allies only five weeks before the war, and which underlay the British decryption known as ULTRA. Polish intelligence didn’t end there but also provided the Allies with key intelligence about the German camps, V-1 and V-2 rockets, and submarines, as well as an intelligence network for north Africa.

The Polish intelligence contribution to Allied victory has been described as “disproportionately large” and much more effective “than subversive or guerilla activities”.

Speaking of subversive or guerilla activities, finally there was the war in Poland itself – or rather the war on Poland itself. The German campaign may have ended but if anything that only represented an escalation in the German war on Poland – with far more Polish casualties from occupation than the military campaign in 1939. Poland has one of the highest casualties in absolute terms for those killed in the war – approximately 6 million, almost all civilians and over half of which were Polish Jews – and the highest as a proportion of its population, approximately 17%.

Of course, that wasn’t all the German occupation – a small proportion was from the Soviet occupation, most infamously the captured Polish soldiers killed by the Soviets at Katyn.

That prompted Polish resistance movements and the Polish Underground State, with an overall strength that was the largest or one of the largest resistance movements in Europe – in which the largest Polish resistance organization was the Home Army (Army Krajowa or AK), although there was a plethora of other organizations.

The Polish resistance fought two famous uprisings in Warsaw – firstly, the Warsaw Ghetto Rising by the Jews against deportation to the camps in April 1943, and secondly (even more famously and on a larger scale), the Warsaw Uprising in August 1944 as Soviet forces advanced on the city. Equally as famously, those Soviet forces sat it out while the Germans crushed the Uprising, destroying Warsaw far more thoroughly than the German campaign in 1939 did. The Soviet forces were at the limits of their supply and logistic chains, but they were also not inclined to do too much to address that (or otherwise assist the western Allied air forces to drop aid to the Poles), given the convenience of Germany destroying the non-communist Polish resistance.

H.P. Willmott observed the irony that Germany treated Poland atrociously and France leniently, while the reverse might have better suited Germany’s purpose. I have observed that I do not understand why Germany crushed the Warsaw Uprising, when it might have suited Germany better to withdraw to another defensive line, leaving it intact as a potential thorn in the side for the Soviets.

I’ve left the end date of this entry as the surrender of Germany but in effect part of the Polish resistance or underground war and indeed of the partition of Poland continued afterwards with respect to the Soviets – with the latter continuing to this day and onwards, as Poland never retained the loss of its territory from the Soviet part of the Pact.

 

RATING: 4 STARS****

A-TIER (TOP TIER)