My initial source was Japanese, a series of monographs prepared by ex-IJA officers under the supervision of US occupation authorities, translated and published in the 1950s as Japanese Special Studies on Manchuria (13 vols, U.S. Army, Forces in the Far East, Tokyo, 1954-1956). See vol XI, part 3c, p. 384-9. I have seen the same claim in other sources, but do not recall specifics. If correct, the machines could not have been actual T-34s. Perhaps A-20s or A-32s, Soviet tank designer Koshkin's prototypes that led directly to the production model called T-34. But some narratives of T-34 development suggest that even these early prototypes may not have seen action at Nomonhan (aka Khalkhin Gol). I am not absolutely certain about this.

I'm interested in one of the points you make in your book 'Nomonhan 1939', and this concerns the use of the T34 on p142. Where the Japanese infantry of Colonel Kobayashi's 72nd infantry regiment are attacked by a Soviet tank force including prototype T34's.

I would really be interested to see what the source for that is, as far as I am aware, the T34 only existed as a prototype in January of 1940.

As no one has mentioned them being used in combat prior to 1941.

Many Thanks

Stuart

The U.S. and British governments did indeed struggle to obscure the fact that they had to ally themselves with one totalitarian dictator (Stalin) in order to fight the other totalitarian dictator – Hitler. All the kind words about our heroic ally, "Uncle Joe" Stalin, ring hollow today. That said, without the help of the Soviet Union, it is questionable whether Nazi Germany would have been defeated.

Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia were similar in many ways, perhaps most significantly in that they were the most brutal and extreme forms of totalitarian dictatorship at that time.

It has long been believed that the Soviet regime murdered more innocent civilians than Nazi Germany. That was the conclusion of Robert Conquest's monumental study, "The Great Terror" (1968). Since the end of the USSR and the opening of some Soviet archives, recent new scholarship shows that the Nazis murdered more civilians than the Soviets. See Timothy Snyder, "Bloodlands." (2010).

Stalin even said that Russia would not watch their socialist brethren fall to the capitalist powers. Likewise, Hermann Goering confided in his diary that if the Germans had to lose, it'd be better to end up with the Soviet Socialists than to go capitalist like Britain.

Finally, we should always remember that even the abbreviation "Nazi" was popularized by Stalin after Hitler's betrayal to remove the term "socialist" from the name whenever possible. The west went along with all of this rather than face the fact that they were teaming up with a very unsavory, evil nation that had been allied to Hitler and had death camps of their own — ones that would eventually outdo the Nazis for sheer numbers of dead.

What was the predominant ethnic makeup of the units from Khalkhin Gol?