“However, there is no indication the Soviet infantry is cooperating with the Soviet artillery,” asserted a Japanese Army communiqueé.
It stated Soviet troops had retreated across a marsh adjoining the Changkufeng heights and were erecting barbed-wire defenses."
My impression is that Soviet General Zhukov was not in charge during the 1938 Changkufeng heights incidents, but that because of them, he was assigned there.
Does anyone know exactly when Zhukov took charge?
Just guessing -- if Zhukov were in charge, we wouldn't see serious claims of Soviet infantry & artillery not cooperating.
The quick references (ie, google) are a little hazy on that. Here is the most precise answer I found.
Successfully evading Joseph Stalin's "Great Purge" of the Red Army (1937-1939), Zhukov was selected to command the First Soviet Mongolian Army Group in 1938. Tasked with stopping Japanese aggression along the Mongolian-Manchurian border, Zhukov arrived after the Soviet victory at the Battle of Lake Khasan.
http://militaryhistory.about.com/od/1900s/p/zhukov.htm
Here is another interesting tidbit.
He was briefly attached to the Republican forces during the Spanish Civil War, returning to the USSR in 1937.
http://www.answers.com/topic/georgi-k-zhukov
The Battle of Lake Khasan (July 29, 1938 – August 11, 1938) and also known as the Changkufeng Incident (Chinese & Japanese: 張鼓峰事件, Chinese pinyin: Zhānggǔfēng Shìjiàn, Japanese pronunciation: Chōkohō Jiken) in China and Japan, was an attempted military incursion of Manchukuo (Japanese) into the territory claimed by the Soviet Union. This incursion was founded in the beliefs of the Japanese side that the Soviet Union misinterpreted the demarcation of the boundary based on the Treaty of Peking between Imperial Russia and Manchu China (and subsequent supplementary agreements on demarcation), and furthermore, that the demarcation markers were tampered with.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Lake_Khasan
So Zhukov is not yet on the scene.