Chapter 805: The Far East Fuse

Tang Qiuli ordered Liu Tiehan's troops to launch the offensive in western Liaoning, and after completing the purpose of the campaign, they suddenly retreated to the areas of Panshan, Goubangzi, and Panjin.

At the cost of extremely slight casualties, the Kwantung Army's three divisions with the strongest combat effectiveness were killed and one was killed, and two were heavily damaged, attracting the vast majority of the Kwantung Army's troops to the Shenyang area.

When the time is ripe, Tang Qiuli's important plan on the Sino-Soviet border can be carried out, and this plan, like his recovery of the Outer Méng Ancients, is enough to change the strategic pattern of the Far East and the relations between the Soviet Union and Japan.

The small border city of Suifenhe in the northeast, and the small town of Gelenji in the Far East of the Soviet Union, across the river from the Suifen River, during the day, the residents on both sides of the river, can clearly see each other's daily activities, when the Russians did not occupy this area, this belongs to Chinese territory, is two neighbor-like small towns.

Residents come and go with each other and intermarry, and there is no difference between them and the two towns in the interior, and now, a boundary river and a boundary monument have completely cut off the contacts of the family, and have become two countries.

Suifenhe basically retains the style of a town in northeast China, but after the Japanese army occupied here, there were many more Japanese-style buildings and colonial sècai, because it was close to the Sino-Soviet border, and it was a key defensive area for the Japanese army, and there were many military fortresses and strongholds.

The small town on the other side of the Suifen River, Gelenji, has been completely Russian style, in a small town, there are several Orthodox churches, after Stalin's brutal purge of the Chinese in the Far East, the Chinese aborigines in the town have been wiped out, and it is also a key defensive area of the Soviet army.

Stalin deliberately transformed this territory that originally belonged to China, tried to erase the memory of China from people's memory, changed the religious beliefs of the inhabitants, changed the style of the towns, changed the proportion of the population of the inhabitants, and wanted to carve a deep Russian imprint on this Chinese territory.

Even the Haishanwei, which the Chinese are familiar with, the Russian tsar must preempt, the Soviet Union in the Far East, the only outlet and ice-free port for hegemony in the Pacific Ocean, has also changed the Russian name Vladivostok, which means "conqueror of the East" in Russian, and Stalin was interested in the old tsar's qiē.

Tang Qiuli's choice of this place as a flashpoint to provoke a dispute between the Soviets and the Japanese has a profound meaning: this area has a military port that Stalin attaches more importance to, and moreover, there is also the Second Army of the Soviet Far East that can quickly become an army, so that Stalin will not feel that his troops are weak and blindly retreat, and this battle cannot be fought and does not conform to Tang Qiuli's wishes.

Because the Soviet Union and Japan have signed the Soviet-Japanese Friendship Treaty, neither the Soviet Union nor Japan regards the other side as the most important enemy that must be resolved immediately, although the two countries have an insoluble feud and a conflict of fundamental interests in the present and the future, and sooner or later there will be a war between the two sides, but not now.

Among them, the intentions of the Japanese are the most obvious, nearly a million Kwantung Army soldiers in the northeast, which is the biggest capital used by the Japanese to deal with the Soviets, and the Soviet Union's defense focus is in the European part, however, neither country has the intention of immediately provoking a war, the Japanese are busy occupying China in an all-round way, the Soviets are busy carving up Bōlan with the Germans, and they also have to compete for territory with the small Nordic country Finland, and they must be wary of the fanatical head of Germany.

Therefore, neither the Soviet soldiers nor the Japanese soldiers regarded the border patrol as a matter of high tension and vigilance, and a group of Soviet border guard patrol soldiers, about 30 people, carried out routine patrols along the boundary monuments on the Soviet side of the Suifen River.

This is the road they have walked several times a day, familiar as the living room of their own home, the Soviet patrol while walking carelessly, while talking and laughing in a low voice, passing through a high and low hill, suddenly, a dense rain of bullets, from the hill to the Soviet soldiers, caught off guard, suddenly fell a dozen people.

Immediately, the Soviet soldiers returned fire, and for a while, on the calm Sino-Soviet border, the gunfire was loud, and the dark red ballistics pierced the night sky, and more than a dozen Soviet soldiers were suppressed on the sand by the river by the fierce fire of the other side, and several experienced Soviet veterans had already heard that the ambushers were using the standard equipment of the Japanese infantry, the Type 38 rifle.

The unique crisp "horn hook" shè sound is absolutely different from other weapons, just a dozen or three or eight guns, not so that the Soviet soldiers fall into passivity, but the other side is equipped with seven or eight tǐng light machine guns, dense tongues of fire, hitting the ground in all directions.

The leader of the Soviet patrol who led the team immediately ordered the radio to report the situation to his superiors, "The patrol called the Golenki outpost, our patrol was on our side of the Suifen River, near the boundary pillar No. 183, and was attacked, judging by the weapons used by the other side, the attacker was the Japanese army, and the opponent's fire was very fierce, and more than a dozen people had been killed or wounded, so I asked for support." ”

As soon as the patrol leader finished reporting the situation, the attacker used mortars, a dozen mortars, and a single shell to blow up the remaining dozen Soviet soldiers, and then, after a few simple words in Japanese, the attacker disappeared into the darkness.

An hour later, reinforcements from a company of the Soviet Golenki outpost arrived, the battle was long over, even the smell of gunpowder was blown away by the night wind, and if it were not for the fragmented corpses of Soviet soldiers in the bright flashlight columns, the blood-stained sand, no one would have believed that a skirmish had broken out here.

The commander of the Soviet company who led the team found a dying Soviet soldier and hurriedly asked: "Tell me quickly, who attacked you?" This Soviet soldier, who had already breathed out more and less air, only said the word "Japan" vaguely, tilted his head, and died in the arms of this company commander.

In the battle that took place on the Soviet side near Boundary Pillar No. 183, all 35 members of a patrol squad of the Soviet Army were killed, and the Golenki outpost, which received the report, realized the seriousness of the matter and immediately reported what had happened here to the Ussuriysk (Shuangchengzi in China) Frontier Station of the Soviet Far Eastern Military District.

The Ussuriysk Frontier Station immediately reported the situation to the Far Eastern Military District Command, and at this time the Soviet Far Eastern Military District Command was already busy with a pot of porridge, and not only the Ussuriysk Border Station sent such a report, but other places also sent similar information.

On the night of 23 August, overnight, from Khabarovsk (Boli in Chinese) in the north to Suifenhe in the south, along the border between Manchuria and the Soviet Union for hundreds of kilometers, more than 100 patrols of Soviet border guards were attacked by armed forces, and these patrols were annihilated without exception, and more than 1,300 Soviet soldiers died.

The attacked patrol, before all the people were killed, sent back that the attackers were using Japanese-style weapons, this important clue, after the Soviet Far East Military District summed up the situation, realized the seriousness of the situation, this may be the Japanese army, before the large-scale attack on the territory of the Soviet Union, the attack on the Sino-Soviet border in the Far East, reported to the General Staff of the Soviet Red Army in Moscow.

The General Staff of the Soviet Army, which received the report, a large group of high-ranking generals, studied for half a night, and could not judge the Japanese attempt, to say that it was a signal that the Japanese army was about to attack the Soviet Union, it was not in accordance with the convention, and did not find the movement of the Japanese to move to the border area and mobilize troops on a large scale, so a small-scale scattered attack was tantamount to an attempt to storm the Japanese, and the Japanese would not be stupid enough to do so.

The conclusion of the General Staff was that the Japanese would not attack the Soviet Union on a large scale, but the fact that more than 1,300 of their own soldiers were killed by the Japanese was a real incident, and that the Far Eastern Military District would not make such a head-wrenching joke overturned the judgment of the General Staff that the Japanese army would not attack the Soviet Union on a large scale.

The contradictory conclusions and ironclad facts made the senior generals of the General Staff of the Soviet Army so dispossessed that they had to wait patiently for Comrade Stalin, and when they woke up in the morning, they reported the situation and asked the leaders to decide.

As soon as Stalin woke up in the morning, before he had time to eat breakfast, he received this report that made him unappetizing, and he could not help but feel annoyed when he looked at the contradictory conclusions and the facts with conclusive evidence, but he could not help but feel annoyed for a while when he looked at several high-ranking generals, whose eyes were red, and knew that they had done their best, and that this was a major issue that had a bearing on the fundamental interests of the Soviet Union in the Far East and would affect the future direction of the Soviet Union's national defense.

Stalin calmly said: "Well, comrades generals, this incident is handled in this way, inform Comrade Molotov, and then in his capacity as the People's Commissar of the Soviet Union, lodge a stern protest to Japan, and at the same time, order the Far Eastern Military District to look for evidence in all the places where the fighting took place, and the border guards enter a state of emergency." ”

Stovicchia, the Soviet ambassador to Japan, who had received the domestic order, immediately drove straight to the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs with an angry heart of the protest letter drafted by Molotov himself, and had the intention of scolding the Japanese for treachery in person.

Japanese Foreign Minister Ishishè Inotaro, who received the protest letter, saw the Soviet Ambassador Stovicchia with a blue face, walking in with a menacing attitude, and felt unhappy in his heart, and secretly thought: "This nasty guy, why is he such a face today?" "Inexplicably, with a lot of incomprehension.

After reading this protest book, he almost jumped up from his chair, and his eyes were almost chōu in surprise, he would never believe that the Kwantung Army would do such a brutal act behind the back of the emperor and the base camp, but the protest book of the Soviets was full of words, and he couldn't help but believe it.

Whether the Japanese or the Soviets believed it or not, this plan, directed by Tang Qiuli himself and implemented by Tang Qiuquan, became the first fuse for the successive fierce battles between Japan and the Soviet Union in the Far East of the Soviet Union after that, as the gunshots rang out on the bank of the Suifen River at midnight.