The Bloody White Baron (42 page)

Neither China nor Japan had given up on its ambition to rule Mongolia, despite the Russian occupation. The 1920s saw a series of skirmishes along the Mongolian border, mostly minor but including a fierce clash between the Chinese and Russian armies in November 1929 around Semenov's former base at Manchuli. White exiles, serving with the Chinese military, instigated many of them, and raiding parties of Russian exiles struck into Soviet territory, terrorising and looting villages, just as they had done under Ungern eight years before. When the Soviets struck in force, the White and Chinese forces collapsed in days, leaving the humiliated Chinese to sue for peace.

Although their intervention in the Russian Civil War had been a mistimed waste of men and resources, Japan's ambitions in the region were far from thwarted. Their influence and military strength in Manchuria only grew until, after openly invading in 1931, in 1932 they established a new state, Manchukuo, under the former boy-emperor of China, Pu
Yi. It was the fulfilment of one of Ungern's imperial dreams, the restoration of the Qing and the beginnings of a new nomad empire, even if the Great Manchu Empire was never more than a Japanese puppet.

Alongside Manchukuo, the Japanese carved the territory of Mengjiang, or the Mongol Border Territory, out of Inner Mongolia. It was officially a new country, but received even less international recognition than Manchukuo. The Japanese attempted to draw upon pan-Mongolian ideas to bolster support for Mengjiang, and to attract Mongol volunteers for the army, but the attempt was crippled by the fact that the population of the new state, after the settlements of the last sixty years, was now three-quarters Han Chinese. The nominal head of state was Demchugdongrub, a Chahar prince who claimed, like most Mongolian leaders, descent from Genghis. He was a political opportunist, siding first with the government in Peking, then with Zhang Zuolin and his son, then with the Japanese before ending up, like his much better-known counterpart Henry Pu Yi, the ‘Last Emperor' of China, ‘rehabilitated' by the communists and working in a museum. For the moment, though, he and his Japanese handlers envisaged his accession to the throne of a Greater Mongolia seized back from the Soviets, using the same motley combination of forces - Buriats, Inner Mongolians, Chinese, exiled White Russians - that had made up Ungern's army.

After a particularly bloody skirmish around Lake Khasan, near Vladivostok, in 1938, with three thousand dead on the Japanese side and about half that for the Russians, the two armies clashed in open, large-scale battle in 1939. The ostensible cause of the fighting was whether the border lay on the Khalkin river, as the Japanese claimed, or just past the village of Nomonhan, ten miles east, as the Soviets argued. Strategically, it made only a marginal difference - in the event of an invasion, the Soviet placement would save the Russians from having to strike over the river - but there were much wider implications.

Among the Japanese high command, the impending battle was seen as an opportunity to test the strength of the Soviet Union. Opinion was still divided as to whether imperial expansion should eventually be directed north, into Siberia, or south, against the Dutch and British. For the
Soviets, it was a chance to stem Japanese expansion and secure their eastern borders. Neither side wanted an open war and so the battle remained, in theory, a ‘border conflict'. To the sixteen thousand men who died, it made little difference. Fighting started when Mongolian cavalry wandered across the border to graze their horses, followed by a series of small conflicts until both sides began to build up their armies properly. The Soviets were commanded by an up-and-coming young lieutenant-general, Georgy Zhukov, soon to be one of the greatest commanders of the Second World War.

After months of stalemate the Japanese pushed forward in July, throwing a pontoon bridge across the river and taking the Baintsagan Heights, a strategic hill position on the other side of the river. Zhukov responded with a three-pronged tank attack, striking the Japanese from all sides. The encircled Japanese had neither experience of fighting armour nor the equipment to do so, and resorted to desperate massed attacks, hurling satchel charges against the oncoming tanks. The Soviets suffered more casualties, but they had more men, and soon the Japanese had lost both the Baintsagan Heights and their one bridge across the river. The battle was a long way from both sides' main bases, and supplies became crucial. Here the difference between the military-industrial might of the Soviets and the essentially nineteenth-century logistics of the Japanese became clear, as the Russians used a fleet of sixteen hundred trucks to keep their men in food and ammunition while the Japanese remained dependent on mules and foot porters. Typhus and dysentery swept the Japanese army as a result of tainted water and lack of food, leaving many men incapacitated.

By August, Zhukov was following up his initial success with a massed assault across the river. Using the tactics that he would perfect against the Germans, he co-ordinated air strikes, artillery bombardment and tank assaults. Foreshadowing the American tactics that would be developed against the Japanese later in the war, Soviet flame-thrower tanks burnt out Japanese strongpoints, while two hundred bombers wreaked havoc from high in the sky, above the range of the Japanese fighters. A hundred thousand Russians and Mongolians decisively crushed the sixty thousand Japanese, forty-five thousand of whom died, many committing suicide when surrounded. One of the battalion commanders sacrificed himself in a single-handed charge against a tank, while another took his own life in a more traditional
fashion, disembowelling himself as the Soviets moved on his position. A further three thousand were taken prisoner, of whom only two hundred ever returned to Japan; the others either committed suicide or settled in the Soviet Union or Mongolia, fearful and shamed .
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Tokyo's ambitions towards Mongolia and Siberia were in ruins, and the Japanese high command acquired a new respect for the power of the Red Army - leading them to turn away from plans to strike the Soviet Union in conjunction with Germany, and to look to a fresh enemy instead, the United States. While they never entirely gave up hope of occupying Soviet territory - they ran training schools for the children of exiled Whites in China at the height of the war, looking to train them as translators and guides for the planned invasion of the Soviet Union - the wartime truce between the two countries held. The Mongolians went on to provide both men and materials for the Soviets during the war.
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Their most crucial role, though, was as a jumping-off point for the stunning Soviet invasion of Manchuria in 1945, just after Hiroshima, when the whole of the territory was conquered in barely two weeks.

Many of Ungern's former comrades ended up working for the Japanese. This was one of the most viable options for those who, facing a bleak exile from their homeland, wished to remain in Asia. Others eked out an existence in China, or migrated overseas to start new lives. Pershin fled to China, where he scraped a living as a translator and tutor, and died in poverty in 1936. Alioshin settled in London and published his memoirs during the Second World War. Makeev served as a bodyguard in Shanghai, while Ribo emigrated to the US, continued to work as a doctor and lived until the 1970s. Sipailov fled to China, where he was arrested for the murder of the young Dane, Olufsen. Somehow he engineered his release, and was last heard of in 1932 when, greedy as ever, he led sixteen other exiled Russians in a secret expedition from Manchuria into Mongolia to search for Ungern's gold. Rousted by an NKVD officer and his Mongolian cavalry, he was arrested and handed over to the Japanese.

Of all Ungern's old comrades, it was the flamboyant Ataman Semenov who had the most dramatic post-war career. After fleeing
Chita with the Japanese, he wandered around Korea and Japan for a few months before ending up in Shanghai. After a Bolshevik assassination attempt, he decided China was too dangerous and headed for the United States, intending to make his way to France. In the US he decided to apply for political asylum and found himself caught up in a legal imbroglio concerning his conduct in Siberia. The opposition to his application was led by General W. S. Graves, the former head of the American forces, who loathed him. Numerous witnesses testified to the atrocities committed by Semenov's forces. Accused of presiding over robbery, banditry, bigamy, murder, torture, rape and pillage, he ended up in jail in New York. After his bail was raised by White organisations he was almost lynched by a crowd of three thousand Russians, mostly Jews who blamed him for White anti-Semitism. Eventually he fled the country and returned to Japan, and from there to Manchuria.

In Manchuria he became the godfather of the more reactionary Whites, working with Japanese intelligence and Chinese and Russian gangsters, and overseeing the Cossack overseas union. By the outbreak of the Second World War he was working for the Japanese directly, living in ‘a ninety-thousand yen villa which contains offices, residential quarters, an air raid shelter, and a small arsenal, including stores of ammunition. The residence is carefully guarded by Japanese secret agents.'
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He grew very fat in the face, and extremely ugly. To his credit, he opposed the growing Russian Fascist Union, calling instead, as he always had, for the restoration of a ‘semi-democratic monarchy'. However, when the captured Soviet general Andrei Vlasov formed his Russian Liberation Army, a group of former Russian POWs who fought (reluctantly) for the Nazis, Semenov was quick to declare his friendship. The enemy of the Bolsheviks was still his ally, however unpleasant the company kept.

In 1945, as the Red Army ripped through Manchuria, Semenov planned to flee to China, but the speed of the Soviet advance caught him unprepared. According to White legend, he offered a formal dinner to his captors at his villa, at the end of which the Soviet commander rose, toasted their host, and then placed him under arrest. He was taken back to Russian soil for the first time in twenty-two years and, in a highly publicised trial, sentenced to death as an ‘enemy of the Soviet people' and ‘active accomplice of the Japanese aggressors'. He
was hanged on 30 August, 1946. In the thorough Stalinist manner, his son had already been murdered, and his daughters sent to the Gulag. Like Ungern, the Soviets left no tail.

Ossendowski's career was also dramatic. After escaping to Japan he moved to America and published his memoir of his escape from the Bolsheviks and his time with Ungern,
Beasts, Men, and Gods.
A massive bestseller, the proceeds set him up for life, but he continued to travel and write, maintaining a consistently anti-Soviet line. He returned to his native Poland in 1923 and, when the Nazis invaded, served heroically, despite his age, in the Polish underground. He died of natural causes in January 1945. It was rumoured that just before the end he was visited by a great-nephew of Ungern's who was serving in the Wehrmacht. His death was well timed - he was already on an NKVD list as an enemy of the people.