Övör Mongol Atlas

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Inner Mongolian Army

group · 1936–1945

The Mongol Army (蒙古軍) built by Demchugdongrub from his own banner militia, formalized in 1936 as the military arm of his autonomy movement and then of Mengjiang, commanded through most of its existence by Li Shouxin.

This entry covers the Mongol Army (蒙古軍, Menggu Jun) that Demchugdongrub built up from his own banner’s militia and that became, from 1936, the formal military arm of his autonomy movement and then of the Japanese-sponsored Mengjiang regime, commanded through most of its existence by Li Shouxin. A separate, unrelated force went by a similar English name: the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Army, formed by eastern Mongol groups after the 1931 Mukden Incident and later folded into Communist-aligned resistance under Khafungga and Asigen. This entry does not cover that army, and no source used in this atlas connects the two.

Origins in banner militia, before 1936

Before any formal Japanese-sponsored military body existed, Demchugdongrub had already built an armed following within his own banner. Through the late 1920s he assembled a personal guard force that had grown past a thousand men by 1926, alongside schools, a clinic, a small textile mill, and even a workshop producing small arms and ammunition (Zorigt, “Self-Rule Movement”). Visiting in 1929, Sven Hedin recorded the banner’s army at about a thousand men (Hedin). Demchugdongrub also courted outside patrons for weapons and training: he met the warlord Zhang Xueliang in Mukden in 1929 to source arms, and Chiang Kai-shek in Wuhan in 1932 to discuss forming a Mongol cavalry division (Zorigt, “Self-Rule Movement”).

Japanese interest followed a similar timeline. Kwantung Army intelligence officers courted Demchugdongrub directly over 1934–35, Doihara Kenji in November 1934 and Itagaki Seishiro (together with Prince Sodnamrabdan) in September 1935, specifically to discuss Kwantung Army backing for a Mongol state (Zorigt, “Cooperation with the Japanese”).

A separate, council-wide effort at a broader force also predates 1936. Visiting Pailingmiao shortly after the Mongolian Political Affairs Council’s April 1934 inauguration, the New York Times correspondent Hallett Abend reported that “the first important project of the Mongolian Government is the building up of a Central Mongolian army, something unknown in recent Mongolian history,” and described tribesmen arriving on horseback from across the region to train in modern warfare under “smartly uniformed Young Mongol graduates of Chinese and Japanese military academies” (Abend). This council-wide project predates the palace-centered “Mongolian Army General Headquarters” that Demchugdongrub inaugurated on his own authority in February 1936, and no source used in this atlas traces the one to the other; the two are recorded here separately rather than assumed to be the same institution.

Formal establishment, 1936

A “Mongolian Army General Headquarters” was inaugurated at Demchugdongrub’s own palace on February 12, 1936, using the Chinggis Khan calendar and a new blue banner in place of Republic of China symbols (Zorigt, “Cooperation with the Japanese”). After a first Mongolian Congress at Ujumuchin that April debated a larger pan-Mongol state, a more modest body followed: the Mongolian Military Government (蒙古軍政府, a name that identifies it first and foremost as a military government, also based at a place recorded as Jabsar), formally established at Dehua on May 12, 1936, with Demchugdongrub at its head (Zorigt, “Cooperation with the Japanese”; Jagchid; Moll-Murata, citing Jagchid). That November, Mongol forces attempted to seize Suiyuan from Chinese forces and were defeated at Bat-khaalag itself (Zorigt, “Cooperation with the Japanese”).

Structure and ethnic composition

Sechin Jagchid gives a detailed picture of the army as organized in 1936: two armies totaling nine divisions and two artillery companies, all cavalry, each division numbering roughly twelve hundred men though not all were at full strength (Jagchid). The division ran along ethnic lines that undercut the “Mongol Army” label. The First Army, under Li Shouxin, was built from his own former following, some of them, in Jagchid’s account, old bandit comrades or men of his former superior Cui Xingwu, and was almost entirely Chinese; only its Fourth Division recruited Mongols (Jagchid). The Second Army, under Demchugdongrub’s own command, was composed only of Mongol troops raised mostly from eastern Inner Mongolia, and Jagchid calls it “the core of Prince De’s military efforts to achieve independence.” Its Eighth Division was drawn largely from former “Mongolian bandits,” undisciplined but high in morale and nationalist feeling (Jagchid).

The army’s dependence on Japan was structural. The Japanese Kwantung Army supplied its arms and provisions, which gave Japan heavy influence over it, especially over Li Shouxin’s First Army (Jagchid). The Second Army retained a measure of autonomy under Demchugdongrub until 1938, when a reorganized general headquarters placed the whole force under Li Shouxin as commander-in-chief and stripped that autonomy away (Jagchid). Jagchid records that the Chinese First Army units, whose interest, in his hostile telling, was personal gain rather than Mongol nationhood, were eventually distrusted by Mongols and Japanese alike, reorganized into police forces, and their commanders shifted into civil posts, several of them leaving disappointed (Jagchid).

The Kwantung Army’s 1936 blueprint

The scholar James Boyd has reconstructed, from Kwantung Army archives, a Japanese design for this force that stands apart from how the army actually developed. In January 1936 the Kwantung Army General Staff adopted an “Outline of policy towards Mongolia [the northwest],” which, after several pages on the non-military groundwork, set out a plan for an “Inner Mongolian Army” (Naimōgun) (Boyd). On paper it was a compact, well-balanced force of roughly 5,500 men: two “armies,” each built around two cavalry divisions of about 1,250 men, with mortar companies, a horse-artillery unit, and, in the first army, a tank unit of eighteen vehicles. The intended armament ran to some thirty-six light and twenty-four heavy machine guns, twelve mortars, field guns, and tanks, making it comparatively well-equipped for a Japanese-sponsored “puppet” force (Boyd). Boyd argues the all-cavalry design reflected both the mobility demanded by Inner Mongolia’s vastness and a romantic Japanese image of the Mongols as heirs of Genghis Khan’s horsemen on the famously hardy steppe horse, a mythology that, he contends, seduced the planners into unrealistic expectations (Boyd).

The plan also acknowledged non-military prerequisites. It called for coordinating Japanese agents already in the region, notably the Zenrin Kyōkai (“Good Neighbour Association”), active since 1934 dispensing medical care, and for building roads, schools, and hospitals. Those institutions were needed partly because widespread eye and respiratory disease left much of the population unfit for service, and partly because they were themselves vehicles for Japanese infiltration (Boyd).

Plan versus reality: the Suiyuan defeat

Boyd’s central argument is that this army, in his phrase, “never eventuated in the form that had been planned.” When it went to seize part of Suiyuan in November 1936 (the campaign noted above, which ended in defeat), the force in the field was not the compact blueprint but an unwieldy body of about sixteen thousand in four units: a mix of Mongols, Han Chinese whom the Japanese labeled “Manchukuoan,” and other Han Chinese, largely mounted irregulars whose reliability Japanese officers themselves doubted (Boyd). Only the fourth unit was the Mongol-raised army proper: the enlarged first and second Inner Mongolian Armies, some eleven thousand men, the second commanded by Li Shouxin. That figure corresponds to Jagchid’s account of a two-army, nine-division Mongol force, with the remaining roughly five thousand being the Han “Manchukuoan” irregulars padding it out (Boyd; Jagchid). Boyd suggests the near-doubling from the planned size was achieved by drafting poorly trained recruits of dubious loyalty; against roughly forty-five thousand men under Fu Zuoyi, the force was soundly beaten (Boyd).

Boyd offers four reasons the well-balanced blueprint never materialized. There were too few trained officers and NCOs: a Japanese-run military school at Zhangbei in Chahar held only about five hundred Mongol youths in training by June 1936, far short of what the plan required. The Inner Mongolian population was small: the area under direct Kwantung Army control held perhaps half a million people, which is why the force had to be padded with Han irregulars. Equipment shortages were chronic: the Japanese Army lacked enough heavy weapons even for its own units. And the Kwantung Army was impatient and overconfident, bred by easy earlier victories and a general contempt for Chinese soldiers (Boyd). From period photographs and a 1942 propaganda film, Boyd finds the men wore uniforms nearly identical to the Japanese Army’s, marked only by an arm brassard, and carried a mix of antiquated rifles and occasional modern arms such as the Czech ZB-26 light machine gun, alongside some light artillery and probably a few Type 92 cavalry tanks. He reads this as evidence that the Japanese kept equipping the force after 1937 even though it never became the army first envisioned (Boyd).

The defeat’s wider consequences reached beyond the battlefield. Boyd notes that Fu Zuoyi’s success galvanized Chinese resistance to Japan and may have helped trigger the December 1936 Xi’an Incident, since Zhang Xueliang cited the Suiyuan invasion among his reasons for kidnapping Chiang Kai-shek, thereby nudging the Nationalists and Communists toward a common front (Boyd).

Officer training and the struggle for control

Demchugdongrub treated military education as a nationalist project. He had failed, before the autonomy movement, to secure a branch of the Chinese government’s officers’ academy in Mongolia, so on founding the army in 1936 he established his own Mongolian Military Officers Academy, made himself its director, and modeled it on Chiang Kai-shek’s Whampoa Academy (Jagchid). Near his residence he also ran a Mongolian Army Youth School, an incubator for a nationalist officer cadre where he preached Mongol nationalism directly to the students and even had sinicized Tümed families send children to be “re-Mongolianized” (Jagchid). A larger Mongolian Army Officer Academy was established at Hohhot on June 1, 1943, under Nomundalai, ending the earlier practice of sending candidate officers to the Japanese-run Kinggan Army Officers Academy in Manchuria (Jagchid).

Behind the training lay a contest for control of the army. Jagchid describes a “dual control” system in which the Japanese, over Demchugdongrub’s objections, took the army out of his hands and placed it nominally under Li Shouxin but really under the Japanese supreme military advisor (Jagchid). Demchugdongrub never stopped trying to influence it, and nationalist officers remained loyal to him; Jagchid maintains that despite Japanese control the army grew steadily more nationalistic, with only a limited number of genuinely pro-Japanese officers (Jagchid). As the Pacific War dragged on, some officers trained in Outer Mongolia sought contact with Outer Mongolian agents. When Demchugdongrub learned of both the plan and an informer about to betray it to the Japanese, he quietly had the informer, Bayar, seized and imprisoned at a monastery in the Sunid Right Banner to bury the affair (Jagchid).

Under Li Shouxin, through Mengjiang’s successive governments

Li Shouxin, a Mongol from the Tümed Right Banner whose rise the sources trace variously (see his entry for the conflicting Northeastern-Army and bandit-chief accounts), became the army’s dominant military figure from 1936 onward. Jagchid records him as commander in chief of the Mongolian Army under the Mongolian Allied League Autonomous Government from December 1937, serving under Demchugdongrub’s civil leadership (Jagchid; Zorigt, “Cooperation with the Japanese”). A modern academic biography of Li describes his forces as the military backbone of the regime across its successive governments (Narangerel), and Alfred Lückenhaus’s 1943 propaganda account names him, as “Li Shou-hsin,” supreme commander of the Mengjiang army (Lückenhaus).

Real financial, police, and transport power in Mengjiang more broadly remained largely in Japanese hands throughout, administered through a rotating cast of Japanese “supreme advisors” (Jagchid). The army itself had its own named Japanese military advisor: in December 1941, Matsuzaki Yō (松崎陽, 1899–1981) is recorded as “military advisor to the Mongol army [of Mengjiang],” issuing a set of guidelines for developing Mongolia’s industry that December (Moll-Murata, citing Ganbagana). A modern Mongolian-language academic account of Demchugdongrub’s regime is said to emphasize “the importance accorded to the military and to education” as defining features of his rule, and separately records the establishment of military schools alongside general and elementary schools under Mengjiang (Moll-Murata, citing Ganbagana). This atlas has not reviewed that source directly and relies here on Moll-Murata’s summary of it.

Collapse, August 1945

When Japan’s surrender became known in Kalgan on August 15, 1945, Li Shouxin was with Demchugdongrub at the Mengjiang government’s seat. He tried to concentrate his scattered forces at Hohhot through a subordinate, but lost contact before the troops arrived, and they were absorbed instead by the Chinese warlord Fu Zuoyi (Narangerel). Offered a Communist surrender demand, Li forwarded it to Japanese military headquarters rather than deciding himself; the Japanese reply was that they would surrender only to the United States and Chiang Kai-shek, never to Soviet or Communist forces (Narangerel). Soviet aircraft dropped leaflets denouncing Demchugdongrub as a traitor, and Soviet-Mongolian forces attacked; Li and Demchugdongrub fled Kalgan by train under Japanese protection on August 19 (Narangerel). At Xuanhua the next day, the Nationalist government reorganized the Mongol Army as its “10th Route Army” and named Li its commander. But the force, once some 20,000 strong, had by then largely dissolved under pressure from Fu Zuoyi and other Chinese warlords, leaving Li, in the source’s own phrase, “a commander without troops” (Narangerel).

Postwar remnants, 1945–1949

Over the following two years Li Shouxin tried repeatedly to rebuild a fighting force in eastern Inner Mongolia and southern Manchuria, at times commanding several thousand men, under continuous pressure from Nationalist secret police to keep fighting the Communists while being denied real support (Narangerel). This effort ended in decisive defeat at Kailu on February 25–26, 1947, when Communist-aligned Mongol cavalry under General Asigen stormed the city. Asigen is very likely the same “Ashkan” described elsewhere in this atlas as Khafungga’s brother-in-law and close political partner, meaning Li’s defeat came at the hands of a rival Mongol nationalist network, not only Chinese Communist forces (Narangerel). What remained of his command was folded into a Nationalist cavalry corps later that year and steadily downsized (Narangerel).

A last echo of the institution appeared in 1949. When Demchugdongrub and Li joined the final Mongolian Autonomous Government at Dingyuanying in Alashan, its cabinet included a Peace Preservation Committee under Prince Damzana with Li Shouxin and Bai Haifeng as deputies (Jagchid), a much-reduced remnant of the military structure Li had once commanded across Mengjiang’s governments.

Sources