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Radio War Nerd EP #538 — Battles of Nomonhan Pt. 1: Background, feat. Annibale (Patreon)

Published:
2025-07-29 14:42:28
Imported:
2025-07
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Guest: AnnibaleRecorded: July 26, 2025

The War Nerd is back, along with our old friend Annibale for our series on the Battles of Nomonhan (Khalkhin Gol) on the eve of WWII, the most consequential battles you've never heard of. This episode, Annibale provides background on Japan's politics and militarism from the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-5 up through the failed 1936 coup in Japan led by ultra-rightist army radicals, known as the February 26 Incident.

Total time: 1:34:54Direct link to this episode's mp3 here

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Files

Comments

Josh

LETS GOOOOOOOOOOO

Podconsoomer

Let’s go I’ve seen this battles name so many times hyped to learn about it

Dominic White

Imagine having Annibale on a pub quiz. He'd be a human cheat code.

Emilio Francisco

“Pt. 1” now that’s what I’m talking about right there

Jason Thompson

Everyone tweeted about Gaza… except California senator Adam Schiff. That Russiagate hyping, Colbert schmoozing fuck who represents my state won’t even go that far

John Waaben

He’s a scumbag, a bum, an ass-kissing punk.

Aiden

I’ve been listening to the return of the repressed podcast series about the holodomor and bioweapon science being shared between proto third reich characters and imperial japan. The conclusions might be too conjectural for the war nerd’s taste, but if nothing else it elaborates on how sympathetic the two powers were to each other. And how many of the elites from both went back and forth prior to WWII. Also, regarding the protocols of the elders and Japan admiring it, if you consider the origin of it and consider it as a confession or aspiration of the euro-monarchist-nazi-reactionary-total war apparatus the two powers are in agreement that it is a nice blueprint.

Steven F

Nomonhan plays a nice side part in the Haruki Murakami novel The Wind Up Bird Chronicle. "Dying is the only way to fly free - Nomonhan"

John Waaben

Super excited for this series, but I wonder what Annibale’s thoughts are on One Piece? If any-

CR

I want to make one thing clear: the BBC and Guardian (no one mentioned how batshit that reporter’s story thesis even was) and the NYT and now Obama are taking a victory lap. They are spiking the football on something that they will never stop and that no one else can stop. The west is still winning and the rest of the world has yet to reckon with what a truly pissed of U.S. government can really do. You cannot do anything and will not. And fuck you. They rule the world because they are precisely this evil

Donald Wieand

God I can't wait for the next episode

Patrick Link

What was the book Annibale recommended to Mark about the batttle?

John

Have you ever mentioned Malaparte on the show? I would be curious to hear Annibale's take on him. Kaputt and The Skin are both quite good.

Eli Burnes

Leaked emails revealed that Truman bombed Japan to prevent formation of a United States of Asia

RT

Annibale animanga tier list when

.

Was gonna mention this too. that episode was insane. He’s a great researcher.

Dongo

Feels wrong to not call it the battle of Khalkhin Gol

JJ

We have imperial japanese political economy as a kind of alt history scenario of what ussr might have looked like if they did not do collectivization but just let private farming develop. Meiji japan initially redistributed daimyo lands to farmers. Kind of like what happened in Russian countryside spontaneously during the revolution. Then they just allowed more prosperous farmers to develop and a large rural poor developed who were the tenants and debtors of said prosperous peasants. Urban industrialization was pretty fast but not fast enough to absorb most of this rural poor and the radical army officers who tried to do coups came from this rural poor background.

JoR

I don’t necessarily disagree but I’m a bit confused on why these outlets would do a victory lap by being more critical of Israel than usual. If ya listen to the Israelis they’re (as usual) losing their mind over the mainstream coverage of the Gaza starvation/forced famine. No matter how tame the media takes all are . It’s not smart for business for them to “victory lap” even in the most cold blooded way. They’re just covering their asses because the public perception has completely flipped without them

Blorst of times

Very happy that RWN is returning to Japan. And can not think of a better guest (for anything subject really) than Annibale. Looking forward to the next installment!

Elsie Hupp

In my opinion, [professional antisemite] Bari Weiss should always be referred to as “professional antisemite Bari Weiss” because of how her career consists entirely of filing the serial numbers off of classic, textbook Jew-baiting.

Boobs123

It's such a struggle to understand him that I usually skip these episodes.

Elsie Hupp

If you’re going to file the serial numbers off something, *at least* have it be horny fanfiction. Even at its worst Fifty Shades of Grey is substantially more worthwhile than Islamophobic antisemitism. Remember the tv show Tyrant? Extremely Islamophobic, but also: extremely horny.

Elsie Hupp

The West is “winning” only by changing the definition of “winning” to “losing but also masturbating furiously about it”. We’re going to be “winning” so hard your dick will fall off! (Is ketamine at all like methamphetamine in this regard? A big part of Nazi Germany “winning” WWII was having everyone constantly tweaking.)

JoR

Sounds like Japan was way ahead of its time. No tanks, all Air Force and infantry? Just need drones and they’d roll in 2025. But I guess they’d be the last people on earth to use drones lol

Brian Brain

Such is the life of a Contrarian. Strength to you on your path of (completely unnecessary) struggle.

CR

Are they actually “critical” or just stating grim facts that cannot and will not be rectified?

CR

Exactly how is the west “losing?” More importantly, how is the U.S. losing? It’s extracting billions from Europe but who cares? Europe is a museum with cash reserves that are being carried out like a leveraged buyout. The U.S. has won. It is killing Russians. It is killing Iranians. It deposed Assad and killed Nasrallah and forced a political crisis in Iran. It is still the sole hyperpower. It still dominates the Americas. It still rings China with allies. It has more wealth than any entity in history. Its military empire could end tomorrow and it’s still the largest economy and the only power that can change the future of any state it focuses on. It controls global finance. It has the most common hard currency in the world. The internet cannot exist without the U.S. Purely “Internal” communications of other states still goes through the U.S. physically. The U.S. can turn off the Internet or weaponize it any time it wants. It can turn off GPS any time it wants and shut down navigation of everything from supertankers to DoorDash. The U.S. is king shit and it’s global, let alone domestic, collapse will take longer than Rome’s.

xnfec

A very good, but curious episode. Curious in that the discussion about the beginnings of WW2 was paired with an aside about Gaza, which can be viewed as the end of WW2 in that the Palestinians are being forced to pay for the crimes of the Nazis - in effect if not by design.

Jimothy Realname

America's rise has been much quicker than Rome's, and its fall will be too - it's already started. You're despairing when the tide has already turned. America's supposed overwhelming economic superiority has by now been hollowed out. It's all bubbles. The most valued companies are all tech bullshit with inflated values based on glorified chatbots that they're pretending will bring the eschaton, or are finance/real estate bullshit, or in the case of Tesla, is a car company whose sales are tanking and which produces far fewer cars than any of the real car companies. It's all running on hype and hot air. Meanwhile it's alienating the rest of the world, including its servile underlings in the west, with a ridiculous trade war. Trump's tariffs are in response to this hollowed-out economy. He may be a moron, but he has identified a very real problem: America doesn't manufacture much of anything. How do you run a global empire when your competitor is the world's workshop, and you only have speculative bubbles? So, he's doing his tariff gambit to bring manufacturing back to America, but I very strongly doubt it will work. It's much more likely that it will be counterproductive. On the military front, it's even worse. Yemen, the poorest country in the middle east, fought the US Navy to a standstill. What would China, the world's manufacturing superpower do? The United States hasn't only lost its manufacturing power, it's lost its technical edge. China has caught up in almost every respect, and anywhere they haven't, they have the numbers and industrial base to make up for it a few times over. No, American power is cooked. The West is cooked. Start learnin' Mandarin, buddy.

Nicholas Levis

Yes. But. Unfortunately there is no end to World War II. The victory of the Communists in China, the partition and war in Korea, the continuation in Indochina until the 1970s, Indonesia, Algeria, the Cold War in Europe all the way to the dissolution of the Soviet Union and the aftermath down to the current Ukraine war, nuclear war ("testing") until now, all the re/de-colonization wars for many decades afterward... the madness of the American empire... all of these are in some sense continuations of World War II.

CR

I hate this country as much or more than anyone here but I’m not a fucking idiot.

parker

Im not super into japanese stuff but I always freak out when I hear things like the japanese officers were stupid or they didn't know what they were getting themselves into. And I'm over here like bro they mathematically proved that suicide attacks where more effective and then immediately implemented it. People often confuse crude and vile with stupid and incompetent lol especially in the case of the japanese. Who in my opinion had one of the better officer cores of the big nations. Definitely better than the United States and people don't have the same criticism for us guys like McArthur So always glad to hear Japan deep dive stuff too much pop history surrounding them.

Elsie Hupp

The US is “winning” only in some of the most abstract geopolitical terms. The US is “losing” if you consider the various indicators that go into a country’s Human Development Index. Things are not exactly going great right now in the United States! Losing domestically while winning internationally is what I described earlier as “losing but also masturbating furiously about it”. Or, to use a term from a recent RWN episode: like Israel, the United States is increasingly a zombie state. (Zombies don’t masturbate—as far as I know—but zombies also do not genetically procreate.) Zombies cannot win, but as any fan of George Romero can tell you, zombies being unable to win does not also mean that humanity cannot lose. Braaaaaaaaaaains! 🧟‍♀️

Elsie Hupp

Jimothy—as a compromise position, let’s just say the United States is trying really, really hard to turn into 90s Russia. If the USSR can collapse, then so can the USA.

mud

wonderful to learn that Italians adore Mel Brooks and Young Frankenstein, Annibale always delivers