In August 1939, just weeks before Hitler invaded Poland, the Soviet Union and Japan fought a massive tank battle on the Mongolian border - the largest the world had ever seen at that time.
    The Battle of Khalkhin Gol was the climactic battle of the Nomenhan War. The Soviets always referred to the Nomonhan Incident as the battle of Khalkhin Gol. Following the failure of their first attack over the disputed territory around the Khalkha river, the Japanese withdrew and planned their next move. Defeat was not an option for the Japanese general. After giving his soldiers a fortnight to recover, and restock their supplies, he conceived another assault plan - this one relying on brute force.
    On July 23rd, backed by a massive artillery bombardment, the Japanese threw two divisions at the Soviet forces that had, by now, crossed the river and were defending the Kawatama Bridge. Two days of fierce fighting resulted in some minor Japanese advances, but they were unable to break Soviet lines and reach the bridge. Despite thousands of casualties, the battle was effectively a stalemate.
    Unable to progress further, and rapidly running out of artillery supplies, the Japanese decided that discretion was the better part of valor, and disengaged to plan for another assault.
    By early August, the Japanese had some 75,000 Imperial Japanese Army and Manchurian troops committed, including the 7th and 23rd Infantry Divisions, and cavalry, artillery, and antitank units, supported by some 300-500 planes in three Air Groups. On August 10th the Japanese organized their forces into the 6th Army under General Ogisu Rippu who planned an offensive that would begin on August 24th.
    But the Soviets had also opted for a decision. Alarmed at Hitler's threats against Poland, Stalin wanted to be free from distractions in the Far East. Stalin was prepared to deal with Hitler, but he wanted to do so from as strong a position as possible. In early August, STAVKA, the Soviet high command, sent Lt. General Georgi Zhukov, who was now in command of the newly established First Army Group, an additional 1,625 trucks from European Russia. This gave Zhukov the logistical base he needed for a decisive counter offensive.
    The real battle was logistics, and here Zhukov excelled. His nearest base, on the Trans-Siberian Railway, was 465 miles away across dirt roads. Zhukov estimated his needs at 18,000 tons of artillery shells alone, and fuel and lubricants, food, and everything else needed to sustain a modern warfare offensive. Over the months, Zhukov built up a fleet of 2,600 trucks, including 1,000 fuel trucks.
    Zhukov’s masterpiece assault began at 6:00 a.m., on August 20th. More than 57,000 Soviet and Mongolian troops moved forward along a 48-mile front, supported by 500 tanks and 216 artillery pieces. Surprise was total. Soviet artillery outgunned the Japanese batteries, which were short on ammunition. Russian bombardments cut phone lines, isolated Japanese units, and blasted apart flimsy dugouts. Two hundred SB-2 bombers, heavily supported by fighters, struck Japanese defenses and lines of communications. The Soviet bombers could fly at 20,000 feet, too high for the Japanese fighter planes. Soviet air losses were high, but they were able to establish air superiority over the battlefield.
    A classic combined arms assault followed as thousands of Soviet infantry attacked the Japanese center, Soviet armor encircled the Japanese flanks, and the Soviet air-force and artillery pounded the Japanese from long-range.
    The decisive factor was that Zhukov coordinated his armor with infantry, artillery and air support. The Japanese in the 1930s were hampered by a limited manufacturing base. They could not build airplanes and tanks in sufficient quantities at the same time. The Japanese had opted to develop aircraft production. Now the Japanese paid the price, as Soviet T-26 and T-28 tanks chopped up the weaker Japanese armor. The Soviets had also learned how to counter the Japanese use of Molotov cocktails by converting their tanks to diesel fuel and putting wire mesh netting over vulnerable engine gratings.
    In the fierce fighting that followed, the Soviets cut around the Japanese southern flank, and then the Japanese northern flank, in a classic double envelopment. Soviet tanks, now behind the Japanese, linked up at the village of Nomonhan, trapping the Japanese 23rd Division. The Japanese fought back with desperate courage. One Japanese regimental commander burnt his colors and committed seppuku, rather than surrender. Another died in a last, fanatic banzai charge against oncoming Soviet armor. But it was all in vain. Soviet tanks, equipped with flamethrowers, supported by infantry, destroyed the Japanese strong positions one after another.
    On August 26th, a Japanese counter attack to relieve the trapped 23rd Division was halted by a Soviet tank brigade. The next day, the Japanese 23rd Division made a last bitter effort to break out to the east. They were defeated. By August 31, 1939, the Japanese had been driven back out of the disputed territory. Of 60,000 Japanese troops committed, by some estimates, nearly 45,000 became casualties.
    By August 31st, the encircled Japanese force had been surrounded and decimated. A few Japanese units managed to break out of the encirclement, but those who remained followed Japanese martial tradition and refused to surrender.
    Zhukov wiped them out with air and artillery attacks.
    The battle of Khalkhin-Gol decisively showed the expansionist Japanese military that it was not a match for the Soviets - particularly while Japanese forces were still bogged down throughout China. The Soviets, under the brilliant command of Lt. General Zhukov, combined their forces to stunning effect, while Japanese tactics remained stuck in a pre-modern mind set that valued honor and personal bravery more highly on the battlefield than massed forces and armor and artillery.
    The battle of Kholkin Gol had forged the finest Soviet general of WW II, but the battle had far reaching effects. When Hitler invaded the Soviet Union in 1941, Stalin used the 45 Siberian divisions to reinforce Zhukov’s forces that counterattacked the Germans in front of Moscow. Employing the same tactics that he used against the Japanese two years earlier, Zhukov was able to defeat the German assault on Moscow.  His methods would be repeated time and again against the Germans until the final victory. The Japanese now had no interest in tangling with the Soviets again, and instead, turned toward the south and America, where they would face greater defeat.
    The Defeat at Khalkhin-Gol had shown the Japanese leaders in Tokyo that an expansion to the North-West toward Siberia was no longer an option; ill defended and scattered colonial territories made far easier targets. Even the United States was deemed a less formidable adversary than the Soviet Union and, if the Japanese had not lost at Khalkhin Gol, they would probably have never attacked Pearl Harbor.
    However, although the Japanese probably took the sensible strategic course after Khalkhin Gol of targeting a ‘weaker’ unprepared opponent, they didn’t learn the combat lessons dealt out by the Soviet army. Honor and bravery remained central to the Japanese military mentality and, once her opponent had recovered from the initial onslaught, the United States was able to mass her forces and push the Japanese out of the Pacific and back to the Home Islands in one brutal battle after another.
    In a greater “what if” scenario, if the battle of Khalkhin Gol had not been fought, then there would have not likely been a Russo-Japanese cease fire, meaning that the 45 Siberian divisions on the border would have remained committed. Without these divisions on the Eastern Front, the Soviet Union may have been brought to its knees by Germany.
    Furthermore, neither Japan nor the Soviet Union disseminated much information about the battle. If Germany had known of Japan's failure to invade the U.S.S.R. (something they were apparently counting on to occupy Soviet forces in the Far East), then that may have made Hitler's Russian Adventure significantly less appealing.
    Stalin, however, was not going to let Japan off the hook easily. On August 9, 1945, the Soviet Union launched a massive Blitzkrieg style operation that put to shame all German Blitzkrieg attacks in World War II. The result of this was the Soviet Union took control of all of Manchuria, North Korea, southern Sakhalin Island, and the Kuril Islands in a matter of three weeks. It can also be said that the Truman administration in August 1945, seeing this formidable Soviet force on the door step of Japan, with the possibility of sharing the occupation of the Japanese Islands, deemed it unacceptable. With this in mind, the decision to drop the atomic bombs on Japan weighed heavily to deter, and forestall, the Soviet Union from any such move.