In early September Russian President Vladimir Putin will visit China to attend the events dedicated to the 70th anniversary celebration of Victory in World War II.
As suggested by Mikhail Myagkov, Scientific Director of the Russian Military-Historical Society, MGIMO Professor (University) of the Russian Foreign Ministry, the European, including the scientific public has little awareness of what military action, which fights and battles took place in the Far Easterm theater of operations, in particular in China. Quite a strange situation. We all consider that World War II began on September 1st 1939 in Europe, and ended on Sept 2nd in 1945 in the Far East with the signing of the instrument of Japan's surrender. But what shall we do with 1931, when the Japanese troops invaded Manchuria? What shall we do with 1932, when the puppet state of Manchukuo was established? And the largest group was formed for aggression against China and the Soviet Union "
We must not forget that China entered the actual war, the Sino-Japanese war of liberation in 1931, the major war on July 7th 1937, when the Marco Polo Bridge incident occurred, not far from Beijing, when Japanese troops, violating all established standards, began large-scale military action against China., he said.
"We must not forget that Chinese historians consider that 35 million Chinese people died in this war from the 1930s until 1945. This is a huge figure. Those people included military personnel, but primarily they were civilians. And all the while the huge Japanese forces were drawn precisely on the Chinese front,’’ Myagkov said.
The Americans, of course, were fighting. The Americans had as the main theater of hostilities Oceania, the Pacific Islands, the defense of Australia, Goa, other territories, the Philippines; but a huge mass of the Japanese troops was fighting on the Chinese territory. And in this war, from 1937, the Soviet Union provided active help to China.
We know that after the beginning of the great war in 1937 a special agreement was concluded between China and the Soviet Union, the agreement of non-aggression on 21st August 1937, which was of such a nature that we did not engage with Japan in open war, though we had the right to help China but only in secret mode.
"The outbreaks of conflicts in Hassan in 1938 and in Khalkhin Gol in 1939, including those related to the extension of credit offered by the Soviet Union to the Republic of China for arming its forces. The Japanese followed closely behind this, and in this respect the Chinese repeatedly stressed that our fighting in Khalkhin Gol and Hassan actively helped in the Chinese war for the liberation of its territory. It should be noted that the assistance of the Soviet Union to China was very solid in the 1930s, " Myagkov said.
According to him, the USSR and the Chinese main strategic objectives were the same, that is, we had common strategic objectives to prevent the expansion of the Japanese aggression in the Pacific, to keep China in the war, and thereby help to curb the Japanese aggression. And we know that Japan, becoming a member of the Anti-Comintern Pact along with Germany, Italy, and then joining the Tripartite Pact, nurtured such global plans.
after the start of the Great Patriotic War, when for natural reasons our help to China stopped as we were forced to fight on the Western Front, however, we were constantly keeping a huge military group in the Far East theater of operations. Myagkov said: "When there was the Battle of Moscow, there were even more tanks of our various brands in the Far East, Primorye, than on the Western Front, as we were somehow afraid of Japanese aggression. They had a so-called ‘strategy of ripe persimmon.’ That means the persimmon ripens, the persimmon is falling, the Soviet Union is falling, the Japanese troops invade the Soviet Union. In this regard, we prepared in our schools, it is also a rather unknown episode of history, in the schools of the Comintern, in the GRU schools different specialists for sabotage, for heading guerrilla groups and even the army units which were prepared in the Soviet Union, we were also preparing the Chinese, many of whom then headed various partisan units, and even army units."
