Cloud cover interfered with aerial reconnaissance, hindering Japanese efforts to enumerate Soviet forces. The Kwantung Army resorted to observation balloons, the first of which a Soviet fighter plane shredded with a machine gun a few hours after it went aloft. Zhukov, in any case, had camouflaged his buildup of a huge strike force. He and his team installed artificial noise machines to induce the Japanese to react to ghosts, thereby inuring them to loud sounds and enabling the Soviets to move equipment (which sounded just like the artificial noise). Zhukov also had weapons and men transferred to frontline jumping-off points only at night. Knowing that the Japanese were tapping telephone lines and intercepting radio traffic, Zhukov had disinformation spread, in easily broken code, about the Soviets’ purely defensive stance and their preparations for possible military operations in the autumn.152 The Soviets had detailed intelligence on the location and movement of all Japanese troops in Manchukuo.153 True, Zhukov, showing Stalin-like suspicion, deemed much of the intelligence forwarded to him speculative. So he organized his own ground combat reconnaissance, as well as fighter plane photography. Finally, learning that the Japanese allowed officers to take leaves on Sundays, Zhukov unleashed the full force of the First Army Group across the Halha on Sunday, August 20, at 5:45 a.m.154 The Red Army achieved decisive operational surprise.155
Japanese intelligence continually, egregiously underestimated Soviet capabilities—because of not only Zhukov’s disinformation but also their own prejudices and the reports, a year before, by the defector Lyushkov, whose revelations reinforced the Japanese’s condescending racism. The biggest oversights concerned precisely what Lyushkov had downplayed: the scale and firepower of mechanized corps and long-range artillery. Indeed, although the Japanese had numerical superiority on the borderland—perhaps 75,000 troops to Zhukov’s 57,000—the Soviets had a colossal advantage in armor: almost 600 tanks, more than 500 artillery pieces, 515 fighter planes.156 Soviet-built heavy tanks came off assembly lines in numbers, and enjoyed clear superiority to the lighter Japanese models. More prosaically, the Soviets ingeniously used simple piano wires to trap Japanese tanks, immobilizing them long enough that they could be finished off—the kind of resourcefulness used when one does not underestimate one’s foe. Mongolia’s open grassland and low sandy hills, moreover, proved highly conducive to mechanized warfare (the opposite of the lesson the Soviets had learned in Spain’s urbanized areas), and Zhukov managed the feat of coordinating combined tank, motorized infantry, artillery, and aircraft warfare. This sophistication of strategy, tactics, and generalship surprised the Japanese, too. No less extraordinary was Soviet transport of thousands of tons of ammunition, food, and fuel over the primitive roads—more than 1,300 truckloads daily from the Transbaikal military district.157 The Japanese soldiers, without even water, would take to soaking up the night dew with their towels and chewing.158
Japan’s cult of fighting “spirit,” its piecemeal commitment of forces, pathetic ground support, inferior ordnance, and poor logistics, combined with its no-surrender doctrine, even in the face of superior firepower, to produce catastrophe.159 Stalin had always gotten lucky in his nemeses—Trotsky-Zinoviev-Kamenev-Bukharin, and now the Kwantung Army. He also got lucky in Zhukov, whom the despot evidently had never even met, but who showed himself a self-assured corps commander whose operational mastery exposed Japan’s unsophistication in mobile warfare. To be sure, failure for Zhukov at the Halha River could have meant death in NKVD cellars.160 But then again, that was true for every Soviet commander. He proved to be willing to assume great responsibility and risk. He was decisive, unsentimental, even ruthless—like Stalin. On the third day of the heavily armored offensive, when the Japanese managed to dig in on a strategic hill, causing enormous Soviet casualties, Stern suggested to Zhukov that he halt for a few days to gather forces. Zhukov rudely rejected the idea.161
The very next day, August 24, 1939, as Ribbentrop departed Moscow, the Japanese attempted a desperate broad-daylight frontal assault with no prior scouting or artillery or aerial softening up. This was the beginning of a literal suicide wave. Japanese commanding officers would order their soldiers to take their own lives rather than be captured. Just a week in, on August 28, Zhukov telegrammed Voroshilov: “The Japanese-Manchurian troops that violated the border of the Mongolian People’s Republic . . . have been completely surrounded and annihilated.”162