Zhukov's Victory
All day long a handful of tanks without silencers drove around in the front lines, so that their noise became familiar to the Japanese. Zhukov distributed to his troops the official manual entitled What the Soviet soldier should know about defense. On Sunday, August 20, unbeknownst to the Japanese, 35 infantry battalions, 20 cavalry squadrons, 498 tanks, 346 armored vehicles and 502 guns of all calibers were silently awaiting zero hour.
For the Japanese, the harbinger of the storm was, at 5:45 a.m., a saturation air raid, 150 bombers strong escorted by 100 fighters. This raid struck forward lines and artillery positions. Before the stunned Japanese could pull themselves together, Zhukov's 250 guns and heavy mortars opened fire on their concentrations of troops in reserve. At 8:45 a.m. the infantry charged screamingly behind the tanks. Across the width of the front, the waves of Russian assault broke through the Japanese lines. Their defenders were morally and physically broken by the three hours of bombardment:the Soviet artillery had more guns and more ammunition than the adversary.
The Japanese, however, were undeterred. At a certain point of the front, the attack on their fortifications by a rather inexperienced Russian division ended in bloody failure. This division, probably the 82nd infantry from the Urals, was pinned down by heavy fire and its leader asked Zhukov for new orders. Zhukov ordered him to continue the attack. As the division commander questioned the possibility of doing so, Zhukov relieved him of his command in favor of the division chief of staff. The latter tried to comply with the orders, but without success. Zhukov then dispatched an officer from his own staff. After reorganizing his artillery and receiving support from the air force, the latter succeeded in breaking through at the cost of appalling losses.
Zhukov's southern group was luckier. Powerful armored elements, including a group of self-moving guns and a company of tanks armed with flamethrowers, made a turning movement around the left flank. By August 21, they were in strong positions behind the Japanese forces operating south of the Khailasyn-Gol, an east-west tributary of the Khalkhin-Gol. Two days later, the northern group, supported by the 212th Airborne Brigade (engaged ashore), which formed Zhukov's reserve, fought its way through the heights of Palets to meet the southern group. The junction effected, the enemy found himself surrounded. The fighting did not diminish in intensity, however.
Hiding in their shelters, the Japanese had to be dislodged with flamethrowers. and very few were the surrenders. But. on the Soviet side, the determination was no less savage. 600 dead fell in fierce hand-to-hand combat, this was the tribute to be paid for the neutralization of the buried shelters in the Palets area, during the final phase of the encirclement.
On August 26, the 6th Armored Brigade repelled a Japanese attack and all hope for the encircled troops vanished. The growing superiority of the Soviet air force was enough to prevent the arrival of fresh reinforcement troops in the combat zone. During the first week, the Russian air force flew 474 missions and dropped 190 tons of bombs - a modest figure compared to our current averages, but one of the highest since 1918. During the fighting of the first days, a formation of five Polikarpovs I-16 shot down two Mitsubishi A5M fighters with RS 82 82mm air-to-air rockets. These were probably the first aerial victories achieved with this type of weapon.
But neither Zhukov nor the Soviet authorities were satisfied with this simple return to the frontiers. Zhukov methodically organized the liquidation of Japanese units trapped at various points in the hill area. The ferocious cleaning continued for a whole week. During this phase, Zhukov again demonstrated his tactical acumen and the Red Army its technical superiority. The Japanese troops entrenched on the heights of Remizov relied on the shallow-bedded potholes of the Khailaslyn-Gol to protect their southern flank. One night, the Russian sappers reinforced the bed of the river to allow the crossing by tanks; armed with flamethrowers, the Soviet tanks thus liquidated the last jetties of Japanese resistance.
On the morning of August 31, all the Japanese still present in Mongolian territory were dead or prisoners. Of the 60,000 men caught in the trap, 50,000 were later declared dead, wounded or missing. The 23rd division made up of veterans suffered 99% losses. As for the Russians, they recognized 10,000 killed and wounded for the entire campaign, a figure which seems considerably lower than the truth. The Japanese air force, despite being outnumbered, claimed to have shot down 1,200 Soviet planes (the Russians claiming 660 victories for their part) in four months of hostilities. But at this time, immediate close air support was still in limbo, and the intervention of aviation did not have a decisive influence on the course of ground operations.
On that day, the last of August, Zhukov's weary and filthy tankmen could look east beyond this finally reconquered border, waiting for the order to cross it. On the side of the Kwangtung army, there was panic. The Japanese general staff was emptying the Manchurian depots to reconstitute units to oppose what seemed to be a Soviet tidal wave.
The order to attack never came. In that autumn of 1939, Moscow and the world had other, more pressing concerns. On the same day that Zhukov's troops joined behind Japanese lines, Stalin and Hitler issued the non-aggression pact. The Soviet dictator believed - with unusual naivety - that he had thus bought the time necessary to prepare his country for war.