OUTER MONGOLIA: Frontier Incident

As far as the rest of the world was concerned, for the past six weeks the war between the Japanese and Russians on the border between Outer Mongolia and Manchukuo has been fought by the official Japanese and Russian “news” agencies. The Soviet news bureau, for example, killed 800 Japanese and shot down 45 planes in a four-day battle. The Japanese official releases retaliated by wrecking 100 Russian tanks, shooting down 53 planes. How much of all this was fact or fiction no one knew, for there was no accredited neutral correspondent within days of the trouble-spot. Only the Japanese wounded jamming Harbin hospitals showed the world outside that the border war was not entirely imaginary. Last week Associated Press Correspondent Russell Brines, who works out of Tokyo, after a long, difficult trip, managed to reach the remote Mongolian frontier and began to make the war make sense.

He found a nine-mile front along the Khalka River southeast of Lake Bor on which the opposing armies were pounding each other with planes, tanks and light artillery. A Soviet-Mongol force, he cabled, had fought its way last month across the Khalka and occupied a series of commanding heights from which it raked the Japanese lines with machine-gun fire. Last week three days of continuous Japanese attacks succeeded in dislodging the Mongol flanks, but the centre clung to its positions. Despite rains that turned the dusty plain into a quagmire, both sides dragged up heavy artillery. Japanese reinforcements were brought up from the rail head at Halunarshan while prisoners were sent north to Hailar on the old Chinese Eastern Railway. A “suicide corps” formed, to drive the last 2,000 Mongols back across the Khalka.

Strategy. The region where the Japanese and Soviet Mongols are fighting is known to contain coal and quite possibly oil. Furthermore, no one knows for certain where that part of the border between Outer Mongolia and Manchukuo is. More important than these potential causes of the conflict, however, is the fact that the Lake Bor district lies directly across the probable line of march of a Japanese invasion into central Siberia, and on the left flank of a Russian attack on the Japanese positions in North China. Control of Outer Mongolia may be the decisive factor in a future Russo-Japanese War.

Hot Heads. The Japanese units tangling with the Mongols last week are attached to the famed fire-eating Kwantung Army, the 350,000 crack troops garrisoned in Manchukuo. The “Kwantung clique,” headed by War Minister General Seishiro Itagaki and the radical young officers of the Kwantung Army, is a law unto itself. In 1931, when it decided Manchuria was ripe for plucking, it manufactured the “Mukden Incident” and marched in from Korea, much to the surprise of the Tokyo Government. In Manchukuo it runs the whole show, bossing the Government of Emperor Kang Teh (Henry Pu Yi) and owning or controlling every major industry. Many Kwantung officers deplore the Japanese invasion of western China, believe that the destruction of the Russian menace that hangs forever over Japan’s head should be the most important item on the Japanese agenda.

Modern Mongols. To secure its vital flank, the Soviet Union in 1922-24 helped the herdsmen of Outer Mongolia drive out their ruling princes and establish the Mongolian People’s Republic with a population of 800,000 and an area of one million square miles, almost one-third as large as all Canada. Under Russian tutelage the Mongol revolutionaries have attempted to transform into a semi-modern state a nation whose citizens were nomads with a way of life unchanged in a thousand years. The descendants of Ghengis Khan’s warriors have been taught to drive tanks and trucks and fly airplanes. The Republic now has an Army estimated at 50.000 men and Soviet Russia has seen to it that the People’s Government does not lack planes for all emergencies.

Almost all accounts of Outer Mongolia for the last 15 years have originated in Russia. A few shepherds, it is said, now follow their flocks on bicycles. Ulan Bator Khoto, the capital, has three-story buildings, a theatre and traffic lights, although camels are more numerous than automobiles. Baby industries—machine shops, an arsenal, a power station, leather, shoe and textile factories—have been established. Six months ago excited Mongols raced their tough little ponies against the first railroad train they had ever seen when service was started on a 25-mile narrow-gauge line connecting Ulan Bator Khoto with the country’s only coal mine. Three years ago Dictator Joseph Stalin informed the world that the U. S. S. R. would tolerate no outside interference there, and Foreign Commissar Molotov dittoed these sentiments last May.

Class Struggle. Three times as many Mongols as there are in the Mongolian People’s Republic live in Manchukuo and the chunk of Inner Mongolia now occupied by the Japanese. The Japanese have taken the other side of the Mongol class struggle and lavished gifts and titles on the hereditary princes who have fled from Outer Mongolia. Some day, the Japanese tell them, there will be an independent Mongol confederation and the princes dispossessed by revolution will regain their land and power. In return, when the time comes for war with Russia, they are expected to lead a counterrevolution in Outer Mongolia and help fight the U. S. S. R.

Last week the time for war with Russia had not yet come. With a good part of the Japanese war machine mired deep in China, the Kwantung Army, unless it wanted to commit harakiri, would be unwise to call a showdown with the Soviet Union. That this summer’s clash was just another in the long series of Manchukuoan frontier incidents in which the Kwantung Army works off steam was indicated by a Japanese Army spokesman. He said that Japan had “no intention of expanding the border clashes into a real war so long as the Russians refrain from attacking strategic points.”