A. Coox; Expert on Obscure but Key War

When Japanese and Soviet forces clashed in an undeclared war over a few barren miles between Mongolia and Manchuria in 1939, Alvin D. Coox was a high school student in New York, unaware that the obscure Nomonhan War would consume 30 years of his life.

The result of his prodigious effort was a highly praised, two-volume work that illuminated the critical impact of the conflict on World War II and established Coox’s reputation as the nation’s foremost authority on modern Japanese military history.

Coox, an emeritus professor at San Diego State, where he had been the longtime head of the Center for Asian Studies, died Nov. 4 at a San Diego hospice after a lengthy illness. He was 75.

Although he wrote eight other books on Japan and World War II, “Nomonhan: Japan Against Russia, 1939,” published in 1986 by Stanford University Press, was his masterpiece.

“The genius of it was to recognize what a critically decisive battle it was to World War II,” said Chalmers Johnson, the eminent Asia scholar. “It was every bit as important as Stalingrad and light-years more important than Pearl Harbor. But it is unknown to the run-of-the-mill historian writing in English.”

Coox interviewed 400 former Japanese military officers and other surviving participants to produce the 1,200-page work, which earned the Samuel Eliot Morison Prize from the American Military Institute.

An estimated 50,000 Soviets and 20,000 Japanese died at Nomonhan, a war that was decided in three separate battles over 10 days in August 1939.

Japan’s crushing defeat at Soviet hands changed the course of World War II, Coox said.

Japanese military officials were obsessed with avenging their unprecedented loss. But after Nomonhan, Coox said, Japan “lost its nerve against Russia” and kept delaying its battle plans. Its attack on Pearl Harbor on Dec. 7, 1941, was an afterthought, designed to eliminate U.S. efforts to cut off Japan’s supply of oil from the Dutch East Indies. Once its fuel supplies could be assured, Japanese leaders planned to wage war against the Soviet Union.

But Japan gravely underestimated America’s response and resolve, which ultimately led to its defeat, Coox said.

Coox detailed how Japan’s defeat at Nomonhan affected the structure and outcome of World War II in his epic work, called “the finest English language study written by a single author on modern Asian military history” by the American Historical Review.

Through his painstaking efforts to locate every surviving participant in the war, both Japanese and Soviet, Coox also made a monumental contribution to Japan’s oral history. In a highly unusual honor for a non-Japanese, a group of Japanese veterans placed a copy of his work on Nomonhan in the library at the Yasukuni Shrine, a controversial memorial to Japan’s war dead in Tokyo.

“I was both touched and astounded to think that a Japanese veterans’ group bought a set from the Stanford University Press in English and, in a ceremony at Yasukuni shrine, donated the book so that the souls of those mentioned . . . will rest in peace,” Coox said in a lecture several years ago.

It was the Korean War, however, that set Coox on the path to what became the consuming interest of his scholarly career.

“The Korean War irrevocably changed my life,” he said.

He was teaching at Harvard, where he earned his master’s and doctoral degrees in history and government, when the Korean conflict erupted. A specialist in European history who had written his dissertation on French aerial warfare, he was approached by Johns Hopkins University to help in a study of the Soviet T-34 tank for the Army. To observe the tank in combat, he was commissioned a major in the Army and was flown to Tokyo, where he was attached to the staff of Gen. Douglas MacArthur. He stayed for 13 years.

“I fell in love with East Asia, especially Japan,” he said.

While in Japan, he also met his wife, Hisako, who survives him, along with a son, Roy, of Escondido, and three grandchildren.

In 1964, Coox joined the faculty of San Diego State, where he directed the Center for Asian Studies from 1969 to 1979 and helped establish bachelor’s and master’s programs to develop Asia scholars. He was a longtime director of the university’s Japan Studies Institute and retired in 1995.

In 1992 the Japanese government awarded him the Order of the Rising Sun for his contributions to improving relations between the United States and Japan and fostering Japanese studies in America.