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.