MONGOLIAN BORDER

Otago Daily Times, Issue 23885, 12 August 1939, Page 13

MONGOLIAN BORDER

FURTHER FIGHTING REPORTED TOKIO, Aug. 10. Further fighting is reported on the Mongolian borders. In recent weeks conflicting reports of the fighting in Mongolia between Japanese and Soviet troops have come from Tokio and Moscow respectively. Up to the middle of last month no independent foreign correspondents were able to be. on the spot to see for themselves. The latest exchanges from the United States report, however, that one newspaper man, Mr Russell Brines, an Associated Press correspondent in Japan, had made the difficult journey to Lake Bor, scene of the border fighting, to see for himself what is going on. “He found,” states one precis of his report, “ a nine-mile front along the Khalka River, south-east of Lake Bor, on which the opposing armies were pounding each other with planes, tanks and light artillery. A Soviet-Mongol force, he cabled, had fought its way in June across the Khalka and occupied a series of commanding heights from which it raked the Japanese lines with inachine-gun fire. Continuous Japanese attacks succeeded in dislodging the Mongol flanks, but the centre clung to its positions. “ Despite rains that turned the dusty plain into a quagmire, both sides dragged up heavy artillery. Japanese reinforcements were brought up from the railhead at Halunarshan, while prisoners were sent north to Hailar on the old Chinese Eastern Railway. A ‘suicide corps ’ was formed to drive the last 2000 Mongols back across the Khalka.

The region where the Japanese and Soviet Mongols are fighting is known to contain coal and quite possibly oil. .No one knows for certain where that part of the border between Outer Mongolia and Manchukuo is. More important than these potential causes of the conflict, however. is the fact that the Lake Bor district lies directly across the probable line of march of a Japanese invasion into central Siberia, and on the left flank of a Russian attack on the Japanese positions in North China. Control of Outer Mongolia may be the decisive factor in a future Russo-Japanese war.”