Clouds in the Far East

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At first sight one becomes astonished by the insignificance of those military forces which were concentrated in the Far East during the months of extreme tension in Soviet-Japanese relations. On February 3 the Japanese minister of war, Hayashi,declared that his government had only 50,000 soldiers in Manchuria while the Soviets had concentrated 100,000 men and 300 planes on their nearest border. Blücher, the commander in chief of the Far Eastern army, refuted Hayashi, stating that the Japanese had actually concentrated in Manchuria 130,000 men, more than one-third of their regular army, plus 115,000 Manchukuo soldiers — all told, 245,000 men and 500 planes. At the same time, Blücher added reassuringly that the Soviet armed forces were not inferior to the Japanese. On the scale of a major war, we are dealing here, one may say, with partisan detachments.

The concentration of masses of millions, an unbroken and deep front and a positional war are excluded by the properties of the Far Eastern arena (immense and sparsely populated areas, extremely broken terrain, poor means of communication, remoteness from the key bases). In the Russo-Japanese war of 1904-05, 320,000 soldiers participated on the Russian side, and toward the end, i.e., when the czarist army was completely routed — 500,000. The Japanese hardly numbered as many. The czarist army lacked not transport, not numbers, but ability. Since that time, the technology of war has changed beyond recognition. But the basic properties of the theater of war in the Far East have remained the same. To Japan, Manchuria is an intermediate base, separated from the key bases by sea. The Japanese fleet rules on sea, but not under sea nor in the air. Sea transport is bound up with dangers. The Chinese population of Manchuria is hostile to the Japanese. Like the Soviets, Japan will be unable to concentrate masses of millions on the Far Eastern front. The most modem technology must, of necessity, be correlated with the tactical methods of the past. The strategy of Napoleon, and even of Hannibal, remains to a large measure in force for the Trans-Baikal and the Maritime Provinces. Large-scale cavalry raids will introduce decisive changes into the map of war. The Japanese railroads in Manchuria will be subjected to greater dangers ~than the Soviet line running along the Amur. In the operations of isolated detachments, in cavalry raids at the enemy’s rear, colossal work will entail upon modem technology in the form of aviation as the means of scouting, of maintaining connections of transport, and of bombing. Insofar as the war in the Amur and Maritime Provinces will bear, in general, a mobile and maneuvering character, its outcome will depend to a decisive degree upon the ability of isolated detachments to operate independently; upon the initiative of the lowest ranking officers; and upon the resourcefulness of every soldier who is left to act on his own. In all these respects, the Soviet army, in my opinion, will prove superior to the Japanese, at least by as much as the Japanese army proved superior to the czarist in 1904-05.

As the events of last year have demonstrated, Tokyo cannot make up her mind to begin right now. And in the meantime, with every additional year, the interrelation of forces will not change in favor of Japan. The development of the Kuznietsk military-industrial base has already freed the Far Eastern front from the necessity of depending upon the European rear. The radical reconstruction of the carrying capacity of the Moscow-Khabarovsk railway, by double-tracking the line, was set by the Soviet government as one of the principal tasks for 1934. Conjointly work was begun on the railroad from Lake Baikal to the lower Amur regions, 1,400 kilometers long. The new main line will tap the richest coal regions of Bureya and the mines of Khingan. The Bureya region — which is only 500 kilometers away from Khabarovsk, i.e., one-tenth the distance to the Kuznietsk region — will be transformed by the program of industrial construction into an independent industrial military-technological base for the Far East. The correlation of the gigantic undertakings in transportation and industry with the substantial economic privileges extended to the population of the Far East must lead to a rapid settlement of the territory — and this will cut the ground from under the Siberian plans of Japanese imperialism.

Nevertheless Japan’s internal situation makes war almost inevitable, just as thirty years ago there was no forestalling czarism from it, despite all the voices of warning. There is no paradox in the statement that after the war has broken out in the Far East, it will be either very short, almost instantaneous, or very, very long. Japan’s goal — the seizure of the Far East, and if possible of a considerable section of the Trans-Baikal territory — requires of itself very long periods of time. The war could end quickly only provided the Soviet Union will be able to shatter at the very outset the Japanese offensive, decisively and for a long time to come. For the solution of this defensive task, aviation provides the Soviets with a weapon of inestimable power.

One need not be a devotee of “integral” aerial warfare, i.e., believe in the transference of the decisive military operations to the air, in order to realize that, under certain conditions, aviation is unquestionably capable of solving the war problem by radically paralyzing the offensive operations of the enemy. Such is precisely the case in the Far East. In his complaint about the concentration of Soviet air forces in the Maritime Provinces, Hayashi divulged the easily understood alarm of Japan’s ruling circles, whose political centers, whose military-industrial combines and whose most important war bases are exposed to the blows of the Red air fleets. With the Maritime Provinces as a base, it is possible to spread the greatest havoc among the vital centers of the island empire by means of long-range planes. Even should one concede what is hardly likely, that Japan will be able to muster an equal or superior air force, the danger to the islands will only be lessened but not eliminated. There is no creating an impassable aerial barrier; breaches will be only too frequent, and every breach is pregnant with great consequence. In this duel, the decisive importance will be borne not by the material, technological preponderance which unquestionably lies on the side of Soviet aviation, and which can only increase in the immediate future, but by the relative geographic position of the two sides.

While almost all the Japanese centers are exposed to attack from the air, the Japanese air forces cannot retaliate with blows anywhere nearly equivalent; not only Moscow but also the Kuznietsk base (6,000-7,000 kilometers away!) cannot be reached without a landing. At the same time, neither in the Maritime Provinces nor in Eastern Siberia are there centers so vital that their destruction could exert a decisive or even a telling influence on the course of the war. The advantages of position multiplied by a more powerful technology will give the Red Army a preponderance which is difficult to express in terms of a precise coefficient, but which may prove of decisive importance.

Should the Soviet aviation, however, prove unprepared for the solution of the grandiose task of the third dimension, the center of gravity would revert to the two-dimensional plane, where the laws of the Far Eastern theater would enter into full force; and the principal law reads: slowness. The time has obviously elapsed for the sudden seizure of the Maritime Provinces. Vladivostok today represents a strongly fortified position which may become the Verdun of the Pacific Coast. The attempt to capture a fortress can be made only by land, and would require say a dozen divisions — two and a half to three times more than are required for the defense. Even in the event of complete success this operation would consume months, and thereby leave at the disposal of the Red Army an invaluable supplementary period of time. The westward movement of the Japanese would require colossal preparatory labor: intermediate bases must be fortified; railways and roads must be built. Japan’s very successes in this line would create increasing difficulties for her; because the Red Army would retreat to its own bases while the Japanese would become dispersed within inhospitable territories, having behind their backs enslaved Manchuria, crushed Korea and hostile China. A protracted war would open up the possibility of forming, in the deep rear of the Japanese, a Chinese army with the aid of Soviet technology and Soviet instructors.

But here we already enter into the sphere of world relations, in the true sense of the word, with all the possibilities, dangers and unknown quantities latent in them. Many of the considerations and estimates which were stated above would, of course, be eliminated should the war last a number of years and force the Soviets to place twenty million men under arms. In such a case, the weakest link after transport, or together with transport, would probably prove to be the Soviet rural economy, the fundamental problems of which are still far from solution. However, it is precisely in the perspective of a major war that it is absolutely impermissible to take the question of the USSR in an isolated form, i.e., without direct connection with the entire world situation. What will be the groupings of countries in the East and the West? Will the military coalition of Japan and Germany be realized? Would the USSR find allies, and precisely whom? What will happen to the freedom of the seas? What will be the subsistence level and, in general, the economic position of Japan? Will Germany find itself within a new blockading ring? What will be the relative stability of the regimes of the warring countries? The number of such questions could be multiplied indefinitely. All of them will flow inevitably from the conditions of a world war; but no one can answer them a priori. The answer will be found during the actual course of the mutual destruction of peoples, and this answer may turn out to be a merciless sentence upon our entire civilization.