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Japanese Invasion Of Manchuria

The efforts of tiny Japan to chop up dinosaur China with a samurai sword are mocked in this July 1937 Philadelphia Inquirer cartoon, which was published shortly after Japan had invaded North China. Very soon, however, newsreels of a savage Japanese bombing of Shanghai and headlines announcing sweeping victories over the dragon, jolted many Americans into an awareness of Japan's real military strength.

Several crucial turning points in China's history of turbulence in the period leading up to World War II - a history characterized by constant internal strife and external threats. For nearly three centuries, the country of China, whose people called it by the traditional name of the Middle Kingdom, had been ruled by imperial descendants of the Manchus. But beginning about the middle of the 19th Century, China had been exposed to repeated humiliations at the hands of various intruders. As one result, there were so-called foreign concessions in such cities as Shanghai and Canton. The concessions, exacted from China by England, France, Germany, Japan, the United States and other powers, were actual areas within the cities where the Chinese people had become subject to alien laws and creditors. In the first SinoJapanese War of 1894-1895, the Chinese had been defeated by the Japanese, who had forced them out of the vassal kingdom of Korea and taken other territories including the major island of Formosa, later to be called Taiwan.

These accumulated humiliations helped to breed young revolutionaries. One of their leaders was Sun Yat-sen, who had risen from a peasant background to be educated as a physician in Canton, and yearned to throw off the double yoke of the decrepit Manchu Dynasty and foreign domination. By World War I Sun Yat-sen had succeeded, but the Chinese republic he helped set up was little more than a facade. The real power was divided among dozens of warlords who ruled China like so many medieval barons.

In 1919, the Treaty of Versailles handed over defeated Germany's rights and possessions in Shantung Province, not to China but to her old enemy Japan. To many Chinese this was the final goad to their wounded pride. A student protest starting in Peking swept through the cities, culminating in a general strike at Shanghai. Out of this protest, which became known as the "May Fourth Movement," emerged the beginnings of modern China's two great contending forces, the Nationalists and the Communists.

The Japanese invasion of Manchuria had been carefully arranged. On the night of September 18, 1931, a small charge of dynamite exploded in the marshaling yards of the Japanese-owned South Manchurian Railroad just outside of Mukden, Manchuria's capital. Ostensibly aimed at damaging a Japanese troop train, the bomb did little harm, for a train was able to pass over the tracks soon afterward. But the explosion, set off by Manchurian agents of the Japanese, served its purpose. It was a prearranged excuse for the Japanese Army that was protecting Imperial interests in Manchuria to go into action and take over the country.

The land of Manchuria, lying between Siberia and Korea, was rich in coal, iron and other resources. The territory had long been coveted by Russia and Japan, and both countries held zones of special interest there. The Japanese controlled the previously Russian-held territory in the south as a result of their 1905 victory in the Russo-Japanese War. They also owned the railroad, plus some coal mines belonging to the railroad, and a number of towns along the line. But they wanted more. Overcrowded on their home islands, short of farmland and natural resources, they planned to seize all Manchuria and turn it into a buffer state between Russia and their Korean holdings, at the same time unlocking its riches for themselves.

When the Japanese struck, seizing towns and communications centers throughout southern Manchuria immediately after the Mukden incident, Chiang counseled a policy of no resistance, announcing that China would take its case to the League of Nations. It was a policy that might have restrained the Japanese if any one of the major powers had been prepared to espouse China's rights. Unfortunately, none was. At the League's faraway headquarters in Geneva, the Japanese representatives insisted that they had acted only to restore order, that they had no territorial ambitions and that they would most certainly withdraw once safety of life and property had been assured.

In Washington, Secretary of State Henry L. Stimson received quite different news from the United States Minister to China, Nelson T. Johnson, who reported that what was happening in Manchuria clearly "must fall within any definition of war" - a violation of the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact in which the great powers had condemned the use of force. Stimson proposed to act in defense of United States rights in China, but got little encouragement from nations that had signed the pact: the British were cool to his urging, the French did not even reply, and the Japanese answer bordered on outright insolence. The League eventually appointed a commission, which was headed by Britain's Lord Lytton, to investigate the affair.

In February, Manchuria, whose key center of Mukden had been quickly taken over by Japanese army units, was proclaimed a separate nation under the protection of Japan and was given the new name of Manchukuo - "land of the Manchu." At the head of its puppet government, the Japanese installed Henry P'u Yi, the last of the Manchu dynasty, who had been the infant Emperor of China at the time the Republic was set up.

When the League's investigative commission finally reported in 1932, it flatly condemned Japanese aggression. Japan, however, had no intention of apologizing or surrendering what it had gained. When the other nations at Geneva accepted the report, the Japanese walked out and quit the League, then promptly began pushing their Manchurian invasion farther into the interior toward the Chinese provinces of Jehol and Chahar.

The Communists might not have been able to survive in their new base, remote as it was, except for significant changes that were taking place elsewhere. Each new Japanese advance in the north brought a renewed hatred of Japan. And in 1935 Stalin, seeing Hitler rearming Germany on his west and the Japanese moving ever closer to his eastern flank, laid down a new Communist International line, calling for all enemies of Fascism - in which term he included not only the government of Italy, but also those of Germany and Japan - to form a united front. Encouraged by Moscow, Chinese student demonstrations began to break out once more and a National Salvation Front was organized in Shanghai. Chiang had no patience with this new Communist brand of nationalism; he threw its young leaders in jail. He was, in fact, already planning to attack the survivors of the Long March in Shensi.

This time he proposed to use the Manchurian legions of Marshal Chang Hsueh-liang, who had retreated from his Japanese-occupied homeland and was also encamped in Shensi Province with headquarters at its capital of Sian. Like many of his countrymen, however, Marshal Chang increasingly questioned why Chinese should be killing Chinese while the Imperial emissaries of the Rising Sun were biting into their country and swallowing it piece by piece. He strongly protested his orders to attack the Communist5, with whom he had already been in secret contact. It was then that the Generalissimo flew into Sian to berate his subordinate and issue orders for the attack. And it was then that the Marshal decided to kidnap his chief and persuade him to call off the civil purge and join forces against Japan.

The December 1936 agreement at Sian did not produce a signed declaration of war, but the Japanese read its portents quickly and accurately enough. Three days after Chiang's release, the general of Japan's Manchurian army warned that if Nationalist China did not join his country in opposing Communism he would take "all the steps necessary to assure peace." By then, however, the Nationalists and Communists, much as they distrusted each other, had begun negotiations to end the civil war and make preparations for armed resistance against Japan.

These hostilities broke out in a matter of months. On the balmy summer evening of July 7, 1937, a Japanese company on a training exercise near the venerable Marco Polo bridge at the walled town of Wanping outside Peking attempted to search the town for a missing company member. The Chinese garrison refused entry, and the Japanese opened fire. Soon a minor battle was on.

At first the firefight at the Marco Polo bridge seemed a containable scuffle, but hostilities soon blazed into real war. On July 28 the North China Japanese Command launched a punitive expedition against Chinese troops around Peking who, said one Japanese general, had acted in a manner "derogatory to the Empire of Japan." Waves of airplanes bearing the red insignia of the Rising Sun droned in over North China, bombing and strafing everything that moved on the roads. Columns of infantry led by tanks rumbled across the plains, seizing Peking, Tientsin and other railheads and communications centers, breaching the strategic Nankow Pass and the Great Wall of China, fanning out down rail and highway routes toward the Yellow River on the south. Chinese armies, long on manpower but still short on coordination, tactics and modern weapons, were forced to'fall back again and again. Within weeks China signed a nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union, complete with secret clauses that promised China airplanes, munitions and other aid.

Japan had early hopes of forcing surrender by a single, overwhelming strike, but they soon vanished as fighting broke out farther south in Shanghai. Following the killing of two Japanese marines in the streets in mid-August, the sizable Japanese fleet in the harbor sent a landing force ashore; before long the fleet was pounding Chinese sections of the city with shells, while planes based in Formosa dropped bombs. Tens of thousands of troops were rushed in by the opposing forces as the international waterfront erupted in blinding explosions and columns of oily smoke.

Neither side distinguished itself by its marksmanship: a Chinese bomb intended for the Japanese battleship Idzumo plowed into the lobby of the Palace Hotel, killing among others a visiting Princeton University lecturer named Robert Karl Reischauer and an Australian barmaid known to local admirers as Dodo Dynamite. Another bomb landed in the French Concession right on top of the Great World Amusement Park, killing 450 Chinese refugees and wounding 800 more. Even the U.S.S. Augusta, the flagship of the American Asiatic Fleet, which was anchored in Shanghai Harbor, felt the sting of war when a stray 37 mm anti-aircraft shell dropped among off-duty seamen who were watching a movie on the well deck, wounding 18 and killing a 20-year-old Louisianan named Freddie John Falgout - who may have been the first uniformed American serviceman to die in what was fast becoming World War II.

A good many tons of explosives, however, found their targets in the massed flesh of Chinese troops brought up to repel the invasion. In the nearly three months of savage fighting that followed, with casualties running into the hundreds of thousands, the Chinese line of resistance broke and fell back in confusion up the Yangtze Valley toward the capital of Nanking 190 miles away. On December 3, some 6,000 Japanese soldiers marched through Shanghai's International Settlement in a victory parade, while Japanese shopkeepers and kimono-clad ladies waved little red and white flags and cheered them on with shouts of Banzai! At the same moment, another 100,000 troops were joining forces with a Japanese fleet of close to 100 vessels to pursue Chiang's limp;ng armies up the broad Yangtze Valley.

The Nationalist capital was softened up by daily batterings from waves of bombers, opposed only by a relative handful of fighter pilots flying an assortment of obsolete British, German, Italian and American planes, and trained by a former United States Army flyer named Claire Chennault. He had been brought in by Chiang Kai-shek to organize an air force for the Nationalists; Chennault was later to become head of the American "Flying Tiger" volunteers. On December 13, Nanking fell. Each day during the next few weeks the world heard a new and more horrifying report of the orgy that ensued.

For sheer, uncontrolled butchery, the rape of Nanking set a modern historic mark. Panic gripped the ancient walled city even as the Japanese armies approached. Chinese soldiers littered the streets with cast-off arms and uniforms in their haste to flee; thousands of soldiers and civilians fell and died as they tried to scale the walls and let themselves down the other side, or drowned crossing the Yangtze River on overcrowded junks that capsized and sank.

When the victorious Japanese poured in, they brought wholesale carnage. Frightened Chinese who made the mistake of running - or standing still - were bayoneted or shot. Houses were entered repeatedly and their trembling occupants robbed, beaten and raped. One young Chinese girl brought on a stretcher to a missionary hospital more than a month after the city's fall described how she had been carried off from her home and kept in a hovel for 38 days at the pleasure of her Japanese captors, who attacked her as many as 10 times a day. Chinese men suspected of having served as soldiers were tied together in groups and machinegunned, used for bayonet or hand-grenade practice or simply doused with gasoline and set afire. According to evidence collected by members of the International Relief Committee, more than 40,000 unarmed Chinese were slaughtered by one means or another during the atrocities at Nanking.

Many foreigners living in the capital counted themselves lucky to escape the bloodlust. Not all did. The United States gunboat Panay, stationed in the Yangtze to protect American lives and property and anchored upstream from the city, was deliberately dive-bombed and sunk, despite clear American markings, causing 48 injuries and two deaths. Tokyo hastily assured an outraged Washington that the incident had been a deplorable mistake, agreed to indemnity payments and ordered the senior officer responsible home in disgrace. No amount of talk or money, however, could erase the ominous overtones. Colonel Joseph W. ("Vinegar Joe") Stilwell, then serving as United States military attache to the Chinese government, summed it up - for Americans, at any rate - in his diary: "The bastards."

Before Nanking's fall, Chiang Kai-shek had prudently removed himself and his government elsewhere: 400 miles up the Yangtze to the major industrial center at Hankow. He was, as one of his military leaders put it, "selling space to buy time." As time passed it became clear that he intended to keep on exchanging space for time, refusing offers of a negotiated settlement, vowing to retreat and defend until the Japanese, overextended and exhausted, defeated themselves - or until the United States, Britain and other powers could be drawn into the war on his side.

Despite the urgent lobbying of Chiang's supporters in the United States, such help was slow in forthcoming. Many individual Americans felt profound sympathy for the handsome and touchingly heroic figures of Chiang Kai-shek and his wife, the devoutly Christian, American-educated beauty Mei-ling Soong. A century of religious missionary efforts in China had also given many Americans a strong sense of responsibility to the Chinese people, and church groups appealed for relief funds. Against this hopeful background, Nationalist envoys lobbied for United States government loans and active intervention. But American fear of involvement in a foreign war proved too strong; the most that could be mustered officially was a token loan of $25 million arranged through the Export-Import Bank.

In the spring of 1938 Chinese morale soared briefly when the Japanese war machine met its first notable defeat. Northwest of Nanking, Chinese divisions set a trap with the city of Taierhchuang as bait, then hit the overconfident, advancing Japanese columns from both flanks with seasoned troops and new Russian-supplied tanks; the Japanese sustained 16,000 casualties. But the setback proved to be only temporary. By autumn the last great port city of Canton had fallen under aerial bombardment; the Japanese now held the important seaports and most of the key eastern cities, the rail lines and the rich agricultural and manufacturing areas deep within the heart of China.

In late October, Hankow, the capital Chiang had chosen after the fall of Nanking, was taken by a Japanese pincer movement. Once more, however, the Generalissimo was a step ahead of his pursuers. He had again moved his government 500 miles still farther west, this time to the ancient, hill-crested city of Chungking, a stronghold built high on the cliffs above the turbulent Yangtze. As the Japanese drove inland, whole factories and universities were dismantled ahead of them and carried west to be set up again in or near Chungking. One of the country's largest textile mills packed up its 8,000 tons of machinery early in 1938, shipped it from central China by railroad to Hankow and then by steamer upriver to the mouth of the Yangtze gorges, where the heavy cargo was repacked again to fit on 380 fragile junks. More than a hundred of the boats sank in the river's rapids, but all but a score were salvaged by monumental labor, and the machinery was carried on to Chungking, where the mill was reconstituted in April 1939, the spindles cleaned of rust and set whirring into action again.

Among the many incredible processions that wound their way along the river's cliffs that year were thousands of coolies pulling rickshas loaded with manhole covers, sewer gratings, old radiators - any scrap metal that could be reclaimed in the furnaces of western China and turned into precious iron and steel. Among the travelers were also thousands of students, carrying their libraries and laboratories on their backs, abandoning their shattered universities in occupied Peking, Canton and other cities to reestablish them in the mountains around Chungking, Chengtu and Kunming.

With a million men now tied down on the mainland and no end in sight, Japan desperately tried once more to persuade China to join its "New Order" for East Asia. It managed to win over only Wang Ching-wei, a former premier and rival of Chiang. Wang's views about the future of Asia - he believed that it should be reserved for Asians only - meshed with official Japanese policy; he saw his chance for glory as the head of a puppet government in Nanking. In Chungking, the Generalissimo hung on with granitic patience and an almost messianic pride.

Although frustrated by a costly stalemate in a land of over 400 million people that bent and bled and burned but would not break, the island-born Japanese hung on too. But at last they began to turn their eyes to the easier and more alluring prizes that lay far to the southeast.

Robert T. Elson. . Time Life Education. 1976.

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