Restless Empire (37 page)

By going to war against China in 1937 Japan had achieved exactly what many of its leaders had hoped to avoid: international isolation, distraction from fighting the Soviets, and a massive commitment of men and materiel for an uncertain purpose. Although the emperor’s armies were advancing, the cost was great, and on the Chinese side Chiang Kai-shek had not only mobilized the country behind his leadership but also won the sympathy of the world. It gradually dawned on the Japanese government that Chiang was committed to fighting the war, holding on in the hope of international assistance. This war, Tokyo concluded in the winter of 1937–1938, would not be like its China wars of the past, in which the Chinese side agreed to negotiations after being defeated in initial engagements. It would be a long and bitter modern war. One Japanese soldier, after landing on the Chinese coast in 1937, noted in his diary:

I was filled with a sense of fortune and gratitude for having landed safely on this land, taken by the blood and tears of the marines and forward land units. I offered a small prayer to the spirits of the war
dead and, facing towards the Emperor in the far, far East, while feeling how grateful I am for my country Japan, I was able to sense how horrible this thing called war really is.
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Some of the worst fighting of the Sino-Japanese war took place in the autumn of 1937, in the region between Shanghai and the GMD capital, Nanjing. The GMD’s best troops defended Nanjing but were gradually decimated and pushed back. The Japanese army laid siege to the capital on 7 December, while Chiang vowed to defend it to the end. After a number of battles by the city’s walls, the Japanese broke through on 13 December, and the Chinese defenders fled. The next six weeks saw the worst atrocities against civilians in a captured city during all of World War II. More than 200,000 inhabitants of the Nanjing region and prisoners of war were murdered by Japanese soldiers, often encouraged or even under orders by their superiors. Rape and torture were widespread. John Rabe, a German businessman and Nazi Party member who organized and headed the International Committee for the Nanjing Safety Zone, gave witness to the inferno:

Two Japanese soldiers have climbed over the garden wall and are about to break into our house. When I appear they give the excuse that they saw two Chinese soldiers climb over the wall. When I show them my party badge, they return the same way. In one of the houses in the narrow street behind my garden wall, a woman was raped, and then wounded in the neck with a bayonet. I managed to get an ambulance so we can take her to Kulou Hospital. . . . Last night up to 1,000 women and girls are said to have been raped, about 100 girls at Ginling College for Girls alone. You hear nothing but rape. If husbands or brothers intervene, they are shot. What you hear and see on all sides is the brutality and bestiality of the Japanese soldiers.
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It is hard to explain the causes of these atrocities. Japanese soldiers were incensed that the Chinese army was fighting back after so many years of accommodation. They regarded themselves as better than the Chinese, and seeing comrades killed by Chinese bullets gave rise to a lust for revenge and punishment. The ultimate responsibility lay with the officers who commanded the imperial army as it entered the city, especially Prince Asaka Yasuhiko, the emperor’s uncle, who headed the troops.

The Rape of Nanjing, as the massacre became known, helped solidify Chinese resistance against the invaders. During 1938 and 1939, as the Japanese armies won victory after victory all over the country, the Chinese front held, and the foreign forces had to fight for most of the land they conquered. In October 1938 Wuhan, the biggest city in central China, and Guangzhou, the biggest city in the south, fell to the Japanese. By late 1939 the imperial army had taken control of nearly all of coastal China and was pushing into the interior in the south and west, already holding most of the north. Tokyo had expected Chiang Kai-shek to capitulate or at least seek urgent negotiations for a settlement. But this time there was no way back for Chiang. By putting himself at the head of Chinese nationalism at its moment of truth, Chiang had nailed his colors to the mast of China’s resistance against Japan. Much as General Charles de Gaulle did in France, Chiang had come to believe that he
was
China, that in these fateful months the country only existed through him and the resistance he could offer against Japan. He gave Tokyo no choice but to give up on negotiations, try to destroy Chiang’s government, and break China up into various regimes under Japan’s tutelage.

This policy turned out to be hard for Japan to put into practice. It did, as we shall see, get collaborationist regimes set up in various parts of the country, but it was never able to inflict a decisive defeat on Chiang Kai-shek. Even though Chinese battlefield victories were few and far between, the continous resistance against the Japanese offensives inflicted significant losses on the imperial army and sapped its morale. The fluidity of the frontline as the defenders—both GMD and CCP—turned
to guerrilla warfare led to several cases of Japanese overextension, leaving supply lines and military outposts exposed. Leaders in Tokyo continued to believe that they could force an end to the war by military means, but this victory was projected further and further into the future, as the Chinese resistance destroyed hopes of a sudden overall triumph for Japan.

The costs for China of the first two years of war were enormous, however. Besides the battlefield losses, the civilian population was hit by both warfare and its consequences. In June 1938, thirty-six thousand square miles in Henan, Jiangsu, and Anhui provinces were flooded when Chiang’s government decided to sabotage the dikes of the Yellow river to hinder the Japanese advance. At least half a million people died, and three million were made homeless. Many provinces in north and central China were hit by famine as a result of wartime dislocation. Desperate peasants fled their homes to avoid battles, reprisals, or enforced conscription. Instead of the order they had promised, the Japanese invaders created anarchy in parts of the countryside, as they competed with different Chinese armies for control. Still, the GMD regime survived in spite of the sacrifice they demanded of the population.

In 1939, Chiang Kai-shek and his increasingly exhausted men had two main reasons for a little hope or at least not total despair. The GMD had been able to transfer some of its personnel to a new wartime capital at Chongqing, away from the battlefronts in the western province of Sichuan, and had retained the allegiance of most local leaders in unoccupied parts of the west and south. And Japan was still obsessed with the USSR, to the extent that it kept some of its best troops in the north away from the battlefront against Chinese forces to hold them in reserve in case of a Soviet attack.

I
N LATE SUMMER
1939, the external circumstances for China’s war changed dramatically, and not for the better. At the end of August, the Soviet Union and Germany signed an agreement pledging cooperation
on European matters, the so-called Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. A few days later, Hitler invaded Poland and World War II began. While the Japanese initially were shocked at the marriage of ideological enemies, and at their German ally’s failure to consult with them, the Soviet-German pact did remove the pressure from their northern flank and let them concentrate on the war in China. The GMD government also lost Soviet support for its war effort. For twenty-eight grueling months, China was left to fight the war against Japan alone, testing both the force of Chinese nationalism and the GMD state to the breaking point.

Left free to advance into China, in late 1939, the Japanese went on the offensive on several fronts. In central China they moved into Hunan province from several directions, and even though their attempt at conquering the capital, Changsha, failed, they strongly improved their strategic position. Toward the end of the year, the Japanese invaded Guangxi province in the south. Its capital, Nanning, fell in January 1940. Even worse for Chiang Kai-shek, some local strongmen in the north with long-standing links to his party, such as Yan Xishan in Shanxi, arranged separate ceasefires with the Japanese army. Internationally the war also went badly for the GMD. In July 1940 Britain, which was eyeing limited forms of cooperation with Japan after the Soviet-German pact had soured relations between Berlin and Tokyo, temporarily closed the roads through Burma that had brought vital supplies to the Chongqing regime. At the same time the French authorities in Vietnam, now loyal to the German-controlled Vichy regime in France, cut off supplies from the south. And in late September 1940 came another disaster: Japan and Germany joined in a military alliance, the Axis. Its purpose, according to the treaty text, was “to stand side by side and cooperate with one another in their efforts in the sphere of Greater East Asia and the regions of Europe respectively, wherein it is their prime purpose to establish and maintain a new order of things, intended to promote the mutual prosperity and welfare of the peoples concerned.”
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Japan celebrated its new international breakthrough by a massive bombing offensive in China, similar to that of Germany against Britain. With the Chinese air force destroyed, Japan had full control of the air, and Chinese cities and their civilian populations were made to feel the consequences. With a new collaborationist regime in place in Nanjing, Tokyo believed that Chiang, finally, would be forced to agree to a ceasefire. But Chiang battled on, despite massive defections from the ranks in central China and increasing disobedience from his field commanders, including those of the CCP, with which the government had to fight several battles at the darkest moment of its war with Japan. What saved Chiang was, yet again, Japanese overextension. Japan’s attempts at broad offensives left their front troops exposed, and territory gained sometimes had to be given up because of logistical problems. The battle of Shangao, in southern China, in the spring of 1941 is a good example. The imperial army reached all of its strategic objectives but was still forced back with heavy losses because it could not easily reinforce its frontline over long distances.

With the Soviet Union effectively out of the war in Asia, Chiang Kai-shek was looking for new allies. He knew from the time of the German victories in Europe that his only realistic hope lay with the United States, and he tried desperately to influence Washington to provide aid to China. By the autumn of 1940, the Americans were finally starting to listen, and in November Chiang received his first batch of US credit. In the spring of 1941, just as the GMD were fighting its most desperate battles in south and central China, the administration of Franklin Roosevelt extended the Lend-Lease Agreement, which had supplied Britain during its darkest days, to China. American volunteers began flying new Chinese fighter planes that had been delivered by the United States. Although Chiang knew the United States was not about to enter the war in China with its own forces, the increasingly strict US sanctions against Tokyo convinced him that Roosevelt saw Japan as a growing threat to US positions in the Pacific. When the Japanese leaders signed
a neutrality pact with the Soviets in April 1941, Chiang concluded that Japan would move south and attempt to take control of Southeast Asia. It would get into a war with the Americans and with Britain, he predicted, in which Tokyo would “court its own destruction.” China only had to hold out a bit longer and “the situation in the Pacific will change.”
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After 1937, China, for the first time in its history, mobilized for all-out war as a country driven by ideas of nation and nationalism. Given the mighty odds that the GMD regime went up against, it did not do badly. Most importantly, it avoided a military collapse, which, seen through the prism of the first months of the war, had been a real possibility. Unlike in any international war China had fought since the 1840s, the morale of government troops did not break as soon as fighting began. Instead, in most areas, Chinese troops hung on, with massive losses, against armies that were far superior to their own in technology and training.

The German attack on the Soviet Union in June 1941 meant some nervous weeks for the Chinese leaders. They tried to determine whether this widening of the war in Europe would also mean a widening of the war in Asia. But the Japanese had no appetite for a war against the Soviets and soon concluded that Germany would not succeed in overcoming their new foes within anything like the time Berlin had anticipated. Inside China, the main consequence of Hitler’s attack on the Soviet Union was a renewed alliance between the Chinese government and the Communists, who now were instructed by Moscow to join in an all-out war against the aggressors and their allies. Even though Chiang never succeeded in getting the CCP to play the military role he wanted against Japan, he now at least had it removed as a major troublemaker within nonoccupied China. But he also had to realize that the Soviet Union, now fighting for its own existence, was in no position to support China militarily.