Play as · WW2 1939 · L1 · Soviet Client · Khalkhin Gol

Mongolia - 1939

Mongolia in 1939 is the Mongolian People's Republic - Soviet-aligned since 1924, governed by Marshal Khorloogiin Choibalsan in the same hard-Stalinist style that the Soviet Union itself is operating under, and in May 1939 the staging ground for the Khalkhin Gol (Nomonhan) campaign that will see Soviet and Mongolian forces under Georgy Zhukov defeat the Japanese Kwantung Army in the largest tank battle of the war to date and the decisive engagement that turns Japanese strategic attention away from continental Asia toward the Pacific. Population about 800,000. The strategic identity is the Soviet bulwark in inner Asia - a buffer between Soviet Siberia and Japanese-occupied Manchuria, the second country in the world (after the USSR) to adopt Communist government, and the testing ground for Soviet-Japanese conventional military doctrine.

Starting position

The Mongolian People's Army of 1939 is about 26,000 active personnel, organized in cavalry-heavy formations appropriate to the steppe terrain, equipped with Soviet-supplied small arms and artillery, and integrated operationally with Soviet 17th Army units forward-deployed in Mongolia under the 1936 Treaty of Mutual Assistance. The Khalkhin Gol fighting that begins in May 1939 commits Mongolian cavalry alongside Soviet armored and air forces; the September 1939 culminating Soviet armored counter-offensive that destroys the Japanese 23rd Division does so on terrain that has been Mongolian cavalry country for centuries. The internal-political situation is the Stalinist purge wave that has been running since 1936-37 - about 30,000 Buddhist monks killed, monasteries destroyed, the entire Mongolian Buddhist religious infrastructure that had defined the country's culture for four centuries effectively dismantled.

What turns the campaign

What the Mongolian People's Republic wants is the Khalkhin Gol victory translated into a stable Soviet-Mongolian-Japanese settlement on the eastern frontier (the September 1939 ceasefire holds and is converted into the 1941 Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact that protects both flanks for the duration of the war), the Soviet alliance maintained at the level the security guarantee against Japan requires without further intensifying the internal-political purges that have already devastated Mongolian society, the Buddhist-cultural continuity preserved at whatever level the post-purge political settlement allows, and the Inner Mongolian (Chinese-administered) population question kept off the immediate diplomatic agenda. What Mongolia fears is a renewed Japanese offensive that exceeds Khalkhin Gol scale, a Soviet strategic reorientation that downgrades Mongolian alliance value as the European war demands resources, and a Stalinist internal escalation that consumes what remains of the pre-Communist Mongolian institutional and religious life.

Signature challenge