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Japan's April 1920 Offensive in the Russian Far East by Jamie Bisher
Monday, May 8, 2006
Rated "G" by the Author.
In April 1920, the Japanese Army launched a violent occupation of Russia's Pacific maritime province. This article tells the forgotten story using firsthand accounts.
H. Van Vechten Fay wrote the following eye-witness account of the Japanese offensive as it transpired in the small, yet strategic city of Nikolsk-Ussuriisk. He immediately typed his detailed report of the battle, and, obviously intending to submit it for publication, entitled it: "The Taking of Nikolsk, Siberia By the Japanese, April 5, 1920, By H. Van Vechten Fay, Former Captain, Intelligence Dept., U.S. Army, Now a Newspaper Correspondent." Whether his story was ever published is unknown. However, he apparently gave a copy of his manuscript to an officer of the Russian Railway Service Corps (R.R.S.C.), the small group of American technical advisors then working on the Trans-Siberian and Chinese Eastern railroads, undoubtedly to provide them with fresh intelligence about Japanese activities. R.R.S.C. personnel were regularly harassed, and occasionally even attacked, by Japanese soldiers. When the R.R.S.C. terminated its mission and closed its Harbin office soon after, Fay's report was haphazardly boxed up among a jumble of other reports, messages, and miscellaneous papers, which disappeared into federal warehouses for the next seven decades. It surfaced in the U.S. National Archives, amidst Records of International Conferences, Commissions, and Expositions, the unlikely resting place of the R.R.S.C.'s disordered papers--Record Group 43 (RG 43), New Entry 844, File 238.
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