Army History - 1940s-1950s
As political and religious purges finally drew to a close, the international situation worsened. Fighting had broken out, in May 1939, with Japanese forces based in Manchukuo. That summer a Japanese army invaded eastern Mongolia. Soviet General Georgi Zhukov commanded the Soviet-Mongolian army that met this invasion. Between May and September 1939, there was large-scale ground and aerial fighting along the Khalkhyn Gol, a river in northeastern Mongolia. The Mongolian troops and their Soviet allies severely defeated the Japanese, who may have sustained as many as 80,000 casualties compared with 11,130 on the MongolianSoviet side. Hostilities ended on September 16, 1939. The Soviet Union and Japan signed a truce, and a commission was set up to define the Mongolian-Manchurian border. Although Japan did not invade again, it did mass large military forces along the Mongolian and the Soviet borders in the course of the war, while continuing its southward drive into China.
The Soviet position in Mongolia was now fully consolidated. Throughout World War II, Choybalsan followed Moscow's directives, and Mongolia supported the Soviet Union with livestock, raw materials, money, food, and military clothing. The Mongolian army was maintained intact throughout the war; it served as an important buffer force in the Soviet Far East defense system, but it did not actually join the Red Army. Moreover, the Soviets, on the occasion of the April 13, 1941, Soviet-Japanese Neutrality Pact, obtained a commitment from Japan to respect Mongolia's territorial integrity.
Modernizing the army and keeping it at peak mobilization was a heavy drain on the nation's undeveloped economy and small population. Even so, the party leaders pressed on with what limited social progress they could manage in a wartime situation. As more teachers became trained, literacy began to accelerate, and government efforts to assist the herdsmen in sheltering, feeding, and caring for their livestock continued. Stock raising bore the major war burden, however, and with large Soviet requisitions to fill, herd totals fell sharply during the war.
Mongolia's wartime neutrality ended in the closing days of World War II. On August 10, 1945, two days after the Soviet Union had declared war on Japan, Mongolia also declared war on Japan. The Mongolian army, some 80,000 strong, joined Soviet troops in invading Inner Mongolia and Manchuria. On August 14, 1945, in the Sino-Soviet Treaty of Friendship and Alliance, China agreed to recognize the independence of Mongolia within its "existing boundary," provided that a plebiscite confirmed the Mongolian people's desire for independence. Mongolia obliged, and in an October 20 referendum, 100 percent of the electorate voted for independence from China. On January 5, 1946, China recognized Mongolian independence and, on February 14, agreed to exchange diplomatic representatives. None, however, were exchanged. The ensuing Chinese civil war and the victory of the Chinese communists over the Guomindang government in 1949 led instead to Ulaanbaatar's recognition of the new People's Republic of China.
In early 1946, Mongolia and the Soviet Union renewed the 1936 Protocol Treaty of Friendship and Mutual Assistance for another ten years, this time making it extendable. Although the provisions remained essentially the same, what had been a protocol treaty became a formal treaty to signify that, because China had relinquished claims of suzerainty, Mongolia was legally competent to handle its own foreign affairs. Thus Mongolia's close defense ties with the Soviet Union continued, as did Soviet military assistance in the form of training and matériel.
This treaty encouraged Ulaanbaatar's intransigence against Guomindang (Kuomintang in Wade-Giles romanization), or Chinese Nationalist Party, troops in 1947, when violence flared along the ill-defined and disputed Mongolian-Chinese border in the Altai Mountain region. Indigenous Kazakhs and Mongols had been grazing their herds indiscriminately throughout the entire area, and the Soviets had developed gold and tungsten mines in areas the Chinese considered part of Xinjiang. Kazakh rebels opposed to the Chinese regime had declared their autonomy in 1944, probably with Soviet encouragement; however, when China reestablished control over Xinjiang in 1946, some of the Kazakh leaders redefected to China.
In June 1947, Mongolian cavalry with tank and air support attacked the Kazakh and Chinese troops, apparently in an attempt to take over the disputed territory. The Soviet Union and Mongolia denied that they were aggressors and claimed that the Chinese were 15 kilometers inside Mongolia; the Chinese countered that the Mongolian army had driven 200 kilometers into Xinjiang. The Chinese were driven back, and the Soviets continued to operate the mines despite a further outbreak of fighting in early 1948.
The Mongolian armed forces, with the close and continuous collaboration of the Soviet Red Army, came of age in the years after 1945. It had survived and had helped to suppress internal revolts, had successfully fought the Japanese and the Chinese, and had played a major role in the education, training, and indoctrination of the Mongolian people. The 1949 communist victory in the Chinese civil war eliminated the threat on Mongolia's southern border for the next decade. This development permitted Mongolia to begin reducing its 80,000-troop army, which had been maintained at about that level for 10 years.
During the 1950s, Mongolia was able to deemphasize defense. Defense expenditures dropped from 33 percent of the total budget in 1948 to 15 percent in 1952. Yumjaagiyn Tsedenbal became premier after the death of Choybalsan in 1952. Although he had been a lieutenant general and chief political commissar of the army during World War II, Tsedenbal was an economist, and he was less inclined to maintain a large army without a definite need. Thus, defense expenditures continued their steady drop in the next few years; soldiers went into the labor force and defense funds were diverted into neglected economic development and social services.
The nation's economic and social development required an infrastructure: public buildings, housing, factories, roads, and power plants. The army formed a mobile, disciplined, and partially skilled work force in a country that was short of labor. Units were apprenticed to construction gangs made up of technicians and workers from the Soviet Union, Eastern Europe, and China. By the late 1950s, the army's Military Construction Administration was building workers' apartments and public buildings, and it was in charge of constructing a large part of the industry around Darhan.
The army continued to develop and modernize during the 1950s. It continued to use the two years' compulsory military training to provide Mongolian youth with Marxist-Leninist indoctrination, to ensure their literacy, and to teach them a variety of useful technical skills. Soviet troops continued to be garrisoned in Mongolia until 1956, at first to ensure against Chinese irredentist moves and later, probably, to discourage any deviation that might have resulted from the post-Stalin and postChoybalsan thaw. The combat elements of the now- smaller army were modernized; tanks, self-propelled guns, armored infantry, jet fighters, and surface-to-air missiles replaced the last of the cavalry. Soviet instructors and advisers served with the Mongolian army, but more and more, the Mongolian People's Army was standing on its own, except in the production of arms and heavy equipment.
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