Sorge apologized for having failed to forewarn Moscow that a Japanese action on the frontier was imminent (in fact, it had been an unforeseeable local initiative). In the same coded radio communication, on August 1, 1938, he conveyed that the German ambassador and military attaché had learned that the Japanese wanted to settle the dispute by diplomatic means, but only after seizing the heights.209 When Sorge’s communication reached Stalin, if at all, and what heed the despot might have paid to it remain unclear.210 Stalin’s hypersuspiciousness and categorical judgments were a long-standing problem for Soviet intelligence. He had previously dismissed vouchsafed information supplied by Sorge as “disorientation emanating from German circles.”211 In any case, Stalin was determined to make up for his climbdown in summer 1937—when he had just launched the murders of Red Army commanders—and to erase doubts about the “purged” Red Army.
To unleash a concentrated assault, Blyukher had to import more troops to the remote frontier zone, which took time. He also had to contend with potentially deadly intrigues from the unprincipled Mekhlis, as well as Frinovsky, who exercised command over the NKVD border guard troops yet adamantly refused to coordinate; both were denouncing Blyukher behind his back to Stalin. On August 1, 1938, an accusatory Stalin called Blyukher on the high-frequency phone:
STALIN: Tell me, Blyukher, why is the order of the defense commissar for aerial bombardment of all our territory occupied by the Japanese including the Zaozernaya Heights not being implemented?
BLYUKHER: Reporting. The air force is ready to take off. The takeoff was delayed by adverse meteorological circumstances. This very minute [air force commander Pavel] Rychagov has ordered planes into the air to attack, not taking weather into account. . . . The aviation is taking off right now, but I fear that we will hit our own units and Korean settlements with this bombing.
STALIN: Tell me honestly, comrade Blyukher, do you wish to fight with the Japanese for real? If you do not have such a wish, tell me directly, as becomes a Communist; if you have such a desire, I would think you ought to go out to the site straightaway. I do not understand your fear that the bombing will hit the Korean population, and your fear that the air force cannot carry out its mission because of fog. . . . What do the Koreans matter to you, if the Japanese are hitting batches of our people? What does a little cloudiness mean for Bolshevik aviation if it is really going to defend the honor of its Motherland? I await an answer.
BLYUKHER: The air force has been ordered into the air. . . . Your directives are being implemented and will be implemented with Bolshevik precision.212
Not a hint of humanity: pitiless raison d’état.
Blyukher, without waiting for the full contingent of reinforcements, responded to Stalin’s prompt: he assigned Grigory Stern, his new chief of staff and a veteran of the Spanish civil war whom Stalin esteemed, to evict the Japanese. But on August 2–3, 1938, the Japanese troops, holding the heights, forced the Soviets to advance through heavily exposed corridors, which, in addition, were inhospitable to tanks, and repelled Stern’s assault. Stalin’s insistence on immediate engagement had produced a Soviet bloodbath.
The Soviets rebuffed a Japanese proffer on August 4 of a cease-fire.213 On August 7, Blyukher was ordered out of the combat zone. That same day and the next, Stern led a renewed air and land assault, this time massive. A total of more than 30,000 troops were deployed, counting both sides. But because of the Japanese emperor’s refusal to countenance a possible wider war, even as the Soviet air force conducted large-scale bombing of Japanese rear positions in Korea, the Japanese did not employ air power or artillery even on the front lines. Still, on August 8, Sorge radioed from his sources out of Tokyo that “advocates of strong military action against the USSR are increasing.”214 The emperor was coming around to urgent pleas to allow stronger engagement, if only in self-defense. After the Japanese advanced more Kwantung Army units to the frontier—forces that could attack from the rear and trap Soviet forces on the heights “like a rat in a sack”—Stalin finally agreed to a cease-fire on August 11. Litvinov boasted to Soviet representatives abroad that “Japan has received a lesson, assured of our firmness and will to resist, and of the illusory nature of aid from Germany.”215 In fact, matters had gotten very close to full escalation. And what Nazi Germany might have done in those circumstances remains an open question.216