Battle of Lake Khasan

The Battle of Lake Khasan (29 July – 11 August 1938), also known as the Changkufeng Incident (Хасанские бои, Chinese and Japanese: ; Chinese pinyin: ; Japanese romaji: ) in China and Japan, was an attempted military incursion by Manchukuo, a Japanese puppet state, into the territory claimed and controlled by the Soviet Union. That incursion was founded in the Japanese belief that the Soviet Union had misinterpreted the demarcation of the boundary based on the Treaty of Peking between Imperial Russia and Qing China and the subsequent supplementary agreements on demarcation and tampered with the demarcation markers. Japanese forces occupied the disputed area but withdrew after heavy fighting and a diplomatic settlement. For most of the first half of the twentieth century, there was considerable tension between the Russian (later Soviet), Chinese, and Japanese governments, along their common borders in what became North East China. The Chinese Eastern Railway (CER) was a railway in northeastern China (Manchuria). It connected China and the Russian Far East. The southern branch of the CER, known in the West as the South Manchuria Railway, became the locus and partial casus belli for the Russo-Japanese War and subsequent incidents, leading to the Second Sino-Japanese War and Soviet-Japanese border conflicts. Larger incidents included the Sino-Soviet conflict of 1929 and the Mukden Incident between Japan and China in 1931. The Battle of Lake Khasan was fought between two powers which had long mistrusted each other. In the period before the battle, a series of purges left the Soviet army with many positions filled by inexperienced officers who feared to take the initiative. In July 1938 alone, four and a half times as many people were purged from the Far Eastern Front (the Soviet command in the region) as in the previous twelve months. This in combination with lack of infrastructure, the overburdening of the front's commander, Marshal Vasily Blyukher (or Blücher), shortage of equipment, and poor organization led to the Front being in poor shape.

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