Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945 (13 page)

China was still at peace. But just a month later, on July 7, 1937, reports came in of clashes between the Chinese 29th Army and the Japanese North China Garrison Army, at a small village named Wanping.

Although neither side knew it, the Second World War in Asia had begun.

PART II

DISASTER

Chapter 4

Thirty-seven Days in Summer: The Outbreak of War

W
ANPING DOES NOT LOOK
like the sort of place where the destinies of nations are decided. Even today, it is an unremarkable village about 15 kilometers southwest of Beijing (Beiping). Back in 1937 it was practically countryside. It does, however, have one impressive feature, a granite bridge decorated with the carved heads of nearly five hundred stone lions, which drew the attention of the Venetian traveler Marco Polo, who called it “one of the finest bridges in the world.” This endorsement gave it the name by which it is best known in the West, the Marco Polo Bridge. In Chinese, it is known as Lugouqiao.

In the summer of 1937 the area around Lugouqiao was heavily populated by rival troops. The Chinese 29th Army was under the command of local strongman Song Zheyuan. Also positioned nearby were soldiers of the Japanese North China Garrison Army. The Japanese were allowed to deploy their military in the area because of agreements made after the Boxer Rebellion of 1900, permitting foreign powers to station troops that would protect them against another uprising. The relationship between the two sides was very uneasy, and Song himself was in a difficult position, caught between the government in Nanjing and the Japanese. Chiang’s government wanted Song to refuse to cede any further ground to Japan, but at the same time not to provoke a diplomatic incident; and Song needed to compromise with the Japanese to preserve his own base of power.
¹

In July 1937 diplomats stationed in northern China sensed something in the air. “Rumors have been current in Peiping [Beiping] during the past week of possible disorders being created by disgruntled Chinese or Japanese Nationals,” wrote the counselor in the US Embassy. “The rumors seem primarily due to the uneasiness which has developed among local Chinese as a result of Sung’s lengthening absence.”
²
The counselor’s judgment was that General Song [Sung] was away from base because he was trying to avoid the Japanese, who wanted to pressure him into allowing them to dominate more of north China.

On the evening of July 7 Japanese troops started firing in the area around Wanping. This was not surprising in itself: the foreign powers in north China had been granted the right to carry out military maneuvers when they chose. But this time the Japanese troops went further. The local Japanese commander declared that one of his men had gone missing, and demanded entry to Wanping to search for him. The accusation was clear: the Chinese must have kidnapped or killed him. Over the past few years, the Japanese had become used to making demands of Chinese troops, and their orders were generally obeyed. But this time Song’s troops refused, and low-level skirmishes broke out. It seemed likely that they would die down again; many such clashes had dissipated before, usually after the Chinese had made some concession. However, in distant central China, Chiang Kai-shek decided that it was time for a different sort of response.

When he heard the news of the fighting near Beiping, Chiang was not in Nanjing, but at the resort of Guling at Mount Lushan, in Jiangxi province. Chiang used Lushan as a country retreat during the hot summer months, and throughout the 1930s he invited his advisers there to plan for a future war with Japan. By the summer of 1937, this preparation had become urgent. “China has a responsibility to strengthen itself,” he wrote in his diary. “Only if we develop the psychology that having to fight is inevitable may we perhaps avoid fighting.”
³

Chiang was meeting with his Military Council when he heard the news that Song’s troops had clashed with the Japanese. “The dwarf bandits have attacked at Lugouqiao,” he added in his diary, using the derogatory term for the Japanese that had first emerged in the imperial era. “This is the time for the determination to fight.”
⁴
In his diary, Chiang also reflected on the meaning of the fighting at the Marco Polo Bridge: “Is there going to be trouble for Song Zheyuan? Are the Japanese trying to bring about independence for north China?”
⁵
He then added, more pensively still: “Is this the time to accept the challenge?”
⁶

At first, three of Song Zheyuan’s senior officers cabled Nanjing, telling Chiang that they could not comply with Japanese demands to withdraw from the bridge, “because of the consequences for national sovereignty.”
⁷
However, despite a show of defiance, the Chinese and Japanese local commanders at Wanping began to discuss a cease-fire. It seemed possible that the Marco Polo Bridge skirmish would be resolved quickly.

Chiang was confronted with a fateful question: Was the two-day struggle really just a minor skirmish, like so many before it, or did it herald the start of another major Japanese assault on Chinese territory, like the Manchurian crisis of 1931? If he decided that it was the former, then tensions would quickly cool. After all, north China was not really under Nationalist control, but dominated by a patchwork of regimes run by Chiang’s Chinese rivals and the Japanese military. By letting the fighting go, Chiang would not be immediately worse off. But if he decided that the incident was more serious, a push by Japan to invade and occupy yet more of northern China, leaving the Nationalist heartland in central China vulnerable, then Chiang had a grave decision to make: whether or not to declare war.

The choice was not entirely Chiang’s. Indeed, since the occupation of Manchuria, his options had been narrowing. As Chiang received the news in Lushan, he had to weigh up a complex range of factors, domestic and international, confronting him that hot July.

First, and most immediately, it seemed likely that any compromise settlement would involve his government formally ceding control of the former capital. This was not like giving up Manchuria. The establishment of Manchukuo had been a huge blow to China’s prestige, but not a disaster. Chiang had all but recognized the Japanese client state by 1933. Beiping was a different matter. Under its former name of Beijing, the city had been a national capital for centuries. Although its political importance had waned, it was still a place of immense cultural and emotional significance to many Chinese. The city also had strategic importance: it was the major rail interchange for northern China, connecting the north of China to the inland commercial city of Wuhan, and allowing rail traffic to travel in all four directions of the compass. If Beiping fell under Japanese control, then an order from Tokyo could send thousands of troops from Korea and Manchukuo into the heart of the mainland. If Chiang surrendered the city, he would cede north China for a generation, and put the Nationalist heartland in great danger. Chiang recognized this in his diary entry for July 10: “This is the turning point for existence or obliteration.”
⁸

If it were just Beiping, that would be one thing, but Chiang feared that the city would be just one more conquest in an ever-lengthening list of Japanese provocations in China. Ever since 1931 the journalist Du Zhongyuan (who had been imprisoned for publishing anti-Japanese rhetoric in 1935) and his fellow exiles from occupied Manchuria had used their power in the press to argue that Chiang should be more active and launch a military campaign to recapture the northeast. Despite the rhetoric of “30 million compatriots” under the “iron hooves” of Japanese imperialism, Chiang had not changed his position on resistance: although the Chinese public felt sympathy, Manchuria was simply too distant to arouse the sentiments of the wider population for all-out war. Then, between 1933 and 1935, it had seemed possible that Japan would be content with its gains so far, and that Nationalist China could live, at least for a while, with Manchukuo on its borders. But from 1935 Japanese influence in north China had grown, and it had become clear that they regarded the entire region as their own territory. Chiang was increasingly convinced that Japan would not rest until all China was a client state. If he did not confront them now, then the moment would surely have to come soon. The influential Chinese newspaper
Shenbao
had published an editorial on July 9 starkly entitled “Yet Another Invasion,” and warning: “This act is clearly a planned invasive action by the Japanese. This act is of a truly serious nature, and should shock the world.”
⁹

Yet challenging Japan would be a highly risky venture—possibly a suicidal one. Chiang could expect very little support from the wider world. The year 1937 was a grim one around the globe. In Europe, the political momentum appeared to be with the dictatorships. Hitler’s Nazi Party had re-created Germany as a strong tyranny instead of the weak Weimar democracy that had collapsed in 1933. Mussolini’s Italy likewise seemed orderly and powerful. Many observers ignored the violence and racism that underpinned these regimes to draw the conclusion that authoritarian government was the way of the future. In the USSR, Stalin’s regime had turned its rage inward, and the country had been devastated by a series of purges against its own elites, leading to the execution or exile of millions of citizens, from top military leaders to ordinary schoolteachers. Although most of Europe remained in a sullen peace, the world was also riveted by the Spanish Civil War, in which the Republican forces of the elected government were battling the Nationalist forces of General Franco. The Republicans relied on minimal assistance from the USSR, while Nazi Germany and fascist Italy provided support for Franco. On the sidelines were the democracies, Britain and France, and Chiang could see clearly that they would be offering no help. Spain had already learned that the United States was in no mood for international intervention. Franklin D. Roosevelt had been reelected president just a few months earlier, but had spent much of early 1937 engaged in a wounding and unsuccessful struggle to give himself greater powers to change the composition of the US Supreme Court, while the Depression continued to haunt American life. To return to a war in Europe would be unpopular; to enter a conflict in China was close to unthinkable. So if Chiang wanted to fight back against Japan, he would have to do it on his own. He would also need to calculate how long China could last alone in a war against Japan.

Chiang’s hopes lay with his best troops. Cabling his son Ching-kuo, Chiang told him not to worry about an invasion from Japan, because he had “the means to counter them.”
¹⁰
Chiang was referring to troops trained by von Seeckt and von Falkenhausen, his two German military advisers.
¹¹
It was certainly true that improvements had been made. However, Chiang’s cable was laced with bravado. The reforms needed much longer to bed in, and the number of officers who had gone through training was still small, only 30,000 in number.

Instead, much of Chiang’s strategy would have to rely on troops provided by his supposed subordinates. He not only had to assess how useful such troops would actually be, but also how many commanders would in fact be loyal to him. Song Zheyuan had extensive contacts with the Japanese, and seemed to miss no opportunity to bolster his own position at the expense of Chiang’s.
¹²
Yan Xishan, who led the major inland province of Shanxi, had been known as a progressive warlord. But he had also been part of an anti-Chiang alliance during the 1930 Northern Plains civil war, and had played the Communists and the Japanese off against the Nationalists in the years leading up to 1937. The alliance with the Communists was also very fragile; despite the official message of cooperation, neither side truly trusted the other, and memories of the debacle at Xi’an were still powerful on both sides.
¹³

This unappetizing menu left Chiang with a stark choice: either he acknowledged that north China was lost, or he fought back. But by fighting, the war would undoubtedly expand from a local conflict to an all-out confrontation between the two powers.

The problem was that Chiang did not have time on his side. China did not—as Chiang would have wished—have sufficient time to professionalize more of its military, neutralize the separatist tendencies of its militarist leaders, and strengthen the economic and fiscal base of the country. And the scale of preparation for war in Japan by 1937 made the Chinese efforts look minor indeed. During the attempted coup of February 1936, Japan’s finance minister, Takahashi Korekiyô, had been assassinated. A consequence of his death was a major increase in military spending.
¹⁴
Japan’s government and public were both increasingly fueled by a desire to “teach China a lesson,” and regarded its increasing unification and the growing sense of nationalism with alarm. Unlike in Nazi Germany or fascist Italy, there was no single figure in Japan, no
Duce
or
Führer
, whose personal megalomania lay at the heart of foreign policy. Instead, Japan had ended up with a toxic situation where most of its politicians, military and public, had become infected by “war fever.”

Military spending now took up nearly half Japan’s total budget. Furthermore, recovery from the Depression was fueled in part by growth in heavy industry, much of which made products that would be useful to any future war effort. At home, the media publicized the idea that Japan was being surrounded by hostile powers who wished to prevent its rise. In 1934, the Tokyo government abrogated the 1930 London Naval Treaty, which was supposed to restrain the size of Japan’s navy in comparison with those of the US and the British Empire. Now nothing but budget would prevent Japan expanding its naval capabilities.