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| Some of the 70,000 Troops Japan Sent to Siberia |
By John D. Beatty and Lee A. Rochwerger
Introduction
Beginning in January 1918, the largest and best-known
Japanese WWI-related campaign, referred to as the
Siberian Intervention (Shiberia Shuppei in Japanese),
was the largest international conflict that Japan had
ever entered into up to that time. Of the ten Allied
powers that sent troops to Siberia, the Japanese sent
the largest contingent, stayed the longest, and were
the only ones with specific instructions from their
government about their mission—to create a separate
and independent Siberia as a buffer against whoever
controlled the government in Moscow after the
ongoing Russian Civil War. Those reasons, however,
were poorly articulated to the Japanese public. After
several atrocities, ballooning debts, and shortages
traceable to the project—that in the Taisho period
(1912–25) were not hidden as they would be later—public opinion turned against it. When logistical,
public, economic, and international pressure became
irresistible, the last Japanese forces were withdrawn in
October 1922.
Japan in the Great War
As an ally of Great Britain since 1902, Japan declared
war on the Central Powers in August 1914, knowing
that she could also pick up some German Pacific
territories on the cheap—at least without major
bloodshed. At this stage in Japan's industrialization and
modernization, nothing was “cheap.”
In November 1914, British diplomats asked for Japanese
15 divisions to the Western Front. Since that figure
constituted more than half of the Imperial Japanese
Army (IJA) at the time and would have required some
two million tons of shipping capacity, the effort was
stillborn. On 17 February 1915, Japanese sailors
trained as infantry went ashore with their French and
Russian allies in Singapore to round up Indian
mutineers from the British Army. Japanese naval forces
escorted Allied convoys in the Mediterranean from
April 1917 until the end of the war. In August 1917, the
French enquired about deploying Japanese divisions to
the Balkan front. For a number of reasons, including
the imminent collapse of Russia, the Japanese
demurred.
In January 1915, Japan, trying to take advantage of
Europe's distraction, issued their Twenty-One
Demands to China that would have turned China into
little more than a vassal. The United States, Britain,
France, and Russia took great exception to the power
grab. A watered-down version, known as the Thirteen
Demands, was accepted by China in May. The Twenty-One/Thirteen Demands crisis caused great concern in
Britain about the future of the alliance with Japan. It
also angered Japanese militarists who were beginning
to see foreign policy as their responsibility.
When the Russian Revolution began in 1917, Japan
became concerned about stability in Siberia. Lenin's
Decree on Peace on 8 November 1917 seemed to
indicate that the Reds were taking charge of Russia. By
the end of 1917, after the collapse of the Italian front
and troop withdrawals from Mesopotamia, Britain was
asking for Japanese land troops anywhere. The Treaty
of Brest-Litovsk on 3 March 1918 was greeted with
alarm in Tokyo, as it was negotiated by the Bolsheviks.
The Decision to Intervene
Between Lenin's Decree and the beginning of peace
talks between Russia and Germany, IJA Vice Chief of
Staff Tanaka Giichi formed a Siberia Planning
Committee in February 1918. Their goal was to scratch
out plans for detaching Siberia from Russia and
whoever won the coming civil war over the levers of
power in Moscow. Always frightened of a vengeful
Russian state that would take away her hard-won gains
in East Asia, the plan was made the more urgent by
Japanese fear and hatred of communism. While General Uehara Yūsaku, Chief of the IJA General Staff,
saw an expedition as an opportunity to rid Japan of an
old enemy. Field Marshal Yamagata Aritomo of the
Privy Council and Prime Minister Terauchi Masatake
were more cautious, not wanting more disfavor in the
West after the Twenty-One/Thirteen Demands crisis.
While the Japanese military planned, their allies
dithered. While the Triple Alliance and the U.S. wanted
to restart an eastern front against the Germans, they
were indecisive about exactly how and lacked the
manpower in any event. Already overextended in
Europe, Allied manpower was a big problem for them.
So were the tons of weapons, ammunition, and
equipment intended for the Imperial Russian armies
that were just sitting in warehouses in Russia. This
material became another Allied goal for the
intervention. Gradually they hit on a scheme to land at
Murmansk, Archangel, and Vladivostok to secure the
supplies and the connecting railways. Manpower
would be supplied by the Czech Legion that was made
up of some 50,000 ethnic Czech and Slovak soldiers,
former members of Austro-Hungarian and German
forces captured by the Russians. The Czech Legion was
already fighting Russian Reds alongside the Whites.
But official Japanese action only followed the earlier
direct action by Japanese officers. Japanese sailors
went ashore in Vladivostok on 30 December 1917 to
quell riots between workers' soviets and local
authorities that threatened Japanese businesses. Two
Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) battleships under Rear
Admiral Kato Kanji arrived at Vladivostok on 12 January 1918, two days ahead of a British cruiser out of Hong
Kong. In April 1918, Japanese sailors went ashore at
Vladivostok again, this time to prevent supplies from
falling into German hands. At the same time, IJA
commanders in Manchuria were arming anyone willing
to fight the Reds. These actions alarmed the West
enough to finally act.
After Brest-Litovsk, the Czech Legion refused German
demands to surrender and refused to obey several
pleas and agreements to evacuate, suspecting
treachery. They fought their way onto the Trans-Siberian Railway, managing to clear key points of the
railway by the spring of 1918. This got the attention of
hard-pressed Allied planners still bleeding from the German spring offensives. By the end of June 1918, the
Czechs under Mikhail Diterikhs, a White Russian
general, had cleared Vladivostok of the Reds. Despite
the preemptive actions of the Japanese, the Whites
and the Czechs, the United States and the Entente
committed to up to 7,000 men each in Siberia, but few
seemed to know exactly what for—to secure what
supplies and to rescue whom? Even if the politicians
were clear in their minds what they wanted their
soldiers and sailors to do, the mission was not clearly
articulated to any military force under any flag except
the Japanese. The Japanese generals finally got
government and imperial approval for a 12,000-man
expedition in August 1918. This number could be
expanded, it was made clear, if the mission extended beyond Vladivostok.
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Sometime after the Deployment, the Allies
Paraded in Vladivostok |
Landing and Occupation
The first Japanese troops of the official commitment,
commanded by General Otani Kikuzo, landed at
Vladivostok in July 1918. By marching quickly along the
railway as far west as Chita just south and east of Lake
Baikal, Otani could plead for more help to shore up his
porous lines. Tokyo complied, and by the end of
October, Otani had by most accounts (the number is
still in dispute) 70,000 soldiers and sailors in Siberia. In
addition, some 50,000 Japanese civilian settlers and
businessmen were dispatched, scattering as far west as
Lake Baikal and Buryatia. Otani wasted no time in
claiming that he was the commander of all non-Russian
forces in Russia, a claim that no other nation's forces
acknowledged.
Aftermath
The Siberian Intervention would cost Japan some 5,000
casualties, mostly to typhus and diarrhea. It had also
cost about ¥1 billion (half the total national budget for
two years), spun inflation out of control, and left the
military with little to no leverage to direct foreign and
military policy during the so-called Taisho Democracy
when liberal and democratic government almost took
hold.
It also earned the enmity of Moscow because of
Japanese support for their opponents, delaying
diplomatic recognition of the Soviet Union until 1925.
Diplomatically the whole event was a fiasco. So great
was the number of American and British officers and
officials who were alarmed by the brutality,
disingenuousness, and caprice of the Japanese that
many in both the United States and Great Britain came
to regard a future war with Japan within a generation
as inevitable.
In future postings on Roads to the Great War, we will present Beatty & Rochwerger's further discussions of the performance, crimes, and ultimate withdrawal of the Japanese forces in Siberia. MH
