CHAPTER 17 World War II THE LOSS OF EAST CHINA 翻 During the spring of 1937 there was a period of calm,a deceptive respite before the cataclysm.While the Guomindang and the CCP arred for the propaganda initiative in embracing the united front,the panese watched warily.Arguments and tensions within the Japanese cab- tand army led to a change of government in early 1937;the new premier s General Hayashi Senjuro-previously an effective and forceful war inister-who nevertheless claimed in Tokyo during his maiden address. Ihave no faith in a pugnacious foreign policy."Hayashi's newly appointed eign minister stated publicly that to "avert a crisis at any time"with China,Japan had simply"to walk the open path straightforwardly."Iron- lly,during this lull,the Chinese army was growing more confident and ore restive.In May 1937 the American ambassador in Nanjing worried atanti-Japanese sentiments had now at last become"a part of the Chinese al consciousness,"and his counselor in Peking commented that an explo- onin Hebei might come from the Chinese armies'"growing belief in their n prowess." A number of large and small events then came together in what-cumu- ively-turned out to be a fateful way.Premier Hayashi's government ied to get its economic policies through the Japanese parliament,and was placed by a government headed by the influential but indecisive Prince Konoe.Japan's commanding general in north China suffered a heart attack, nd had to be replaced by a less experienced subordinate.And Chinese oops in the vicinity of the "Marco Polo Bridge"(Lugouqiao)decided to rengthen some shore-line defenses on the banks of the Yongding River 419
420 WAR AND REVOLUTION KOREA 。hnn Yellow Xi'an HENAN angha Hef HUREI SICHUAN ”Chonge4g East HUNAN GUIZHOUF- 通(Guiyang Guln。 GUANGXI TAIWAN shantou THE WAR WITH JAPAN: 北R JAPANESE EXPANSION July 1937-July 1938 July1938-1uy1939 02gn20 July 1939-December 1941 This bridge-about ten miles west of Peking-had once been famed fori beauty;Emperor Qianlong wrote a poem on the loveliness of the setting moon when viewed there in the first light of dawn.Now a strategical important railway bridge had been built next to it,linking the southern line with the junction town of Wanping.An army holding Wanping could com trol rail access to Tianjin,Kalgan,and Taiyuan,and for this reason the Japanese troops in north China often conducted maneuvers in the area, they were entitled to do by the Boxer Protocol of 1901. On July 7,1937,the Japanese chose to make the bridge the base of a nig maneuver by a company from one of the Peking garrison battalions.The troops were also authorized to fire blank cartridges into the air to simula combat conditions.At 10:30 P.M.the Chinese fired some shells into th
W ORLD WAR II 421 THE WAR IN NORTH CHINA. 1937 REHE HEBEI LIAONING Shanhaiguan Peking Marco Polo Bridg Tianjin ●Tanggu ●1 dshun Baoding★ Taiyuan SHANXI SHANDONG anese assembly area without causing casualties.But when one Japanese dier was missing at roll call,the Japanese commander,thinking the Chi- had captured the man,ordered an attack on Wanping.This attack, ch the Chinese beat back,can be considered the first battle of World 需rⅡ. The following day Chinese troops near the rail junction of Wanping anched an attack on the Japanese position,but were repulsed.Over the few days,though the shooting had stopped,there was a flurry of often coordinated negotiations,statements,and counterstatements.These came m the local military commanders on both sides,the Chinese and Japanese horities in Peking,the Chinese and Japanese regional commanders,and governments in Nanjing and Tokyo.Feelings began to run high.The aese War Ministry called for the mobilization of five divisions within an to handle contingencies that might arise in north and central China hile Chiang Kai-shek ordered four divisions to move into the area around oding in southern Hebei.Prince Konoe,in a press conference,insisted tthe incident was"entirely the result of an anti-Japanese military action the part of China,"and that"the Chinese authorities must apologize to for the illegal anti-Japanese actions."Chiang Kai-shek,from his summer
422 WAR AND REVOLUTION home in Kuling,announced that the previous agreements with the Japanese must stand as the status quo:"If we allow one more inch of our territory to be lost,"said Chiang,"we shall be guilty of an unpardonable crime against our race."3 On July 27,just as the local military commanders seemed to be working out withdrawal arrangements,more fighting,fierce this time,erupted around the Marco Polo Bridge.Japanese troops seized the bridge and dug in on the left bank of the Yongding River.By the end of the month they had consolidated their hold over the entire Tianjin-Peking region.Hearing of the Chinese defiance,Prince Konoe called for"a fundamental solution of Sino-Japanese relations."Chiang responded:"The only course open to us now is to lead the masses of the nation,under a single national plan,to struggle to the last." In a major military and strategic gamble,Chiang Kai-shek decided to deflect the Japanese from their campaign in north China by launching an attack on their forces in the Shanghai area.It was here that Chiang had the bulk of his best German-trained divisions,primed for action since the Com munists had been forced out of the Jiangxi Soviet onto the Long March. His forces outnumbered the Japanese in Shanghai by more than 10 to I. and he had taken the precaution of constructing-again with German advice-a protective line of concrete blockhouses in the area of Wuxi on the railroad to Nanjing,should retreat become necessary. On August 14,Chiang Kai-shek ordered his air force to bomb the Jap anese warships at anchor off the docks of Shanghai.If he had hoped that this would be a triumphal revenge for the humiliating destruction by the Japanese navy of the Qing forces at Weihaiwei in 1895,he was sadly dis appointed.Not only had the Nationalist air force lost the element of surprise when the Japanese intercepted and decoded a secret telegram,but the Chi- nese planes bombed inaccurately and ineffectively,missing the Japanese fleet and instead hitting the city of Shanghai,killing hundreds of civilians Despite this tragic fiasco,the commanding Japanese admiral announced that "the imperial navy,having borne the unbearable,is now compelled to take every possible and effective measure."Prince Konoe declared that Japan was now "forced to resort to resolute action to bring sense to the Nanjing government."5 With the "war"still undeclared,the Japanese government sent fifteen new divisions to north and central China.Chiang ordered his troops to overcome the Japanese in Shanghai at all costs,but they failed in their early attempts to break the Japanese defensive perimeter.In late August and all through September and October,the Chinese,now on the defensive,fought with extraordinary heroism,even though they were shelled continuously by
WORLD WAR I I 423 heavy guns of the Japanese navy,bombed by Japanese carrier and land- ased planes (including some from Japanese-occupied Taiwan),and acked repeatedly by heavily armored Japanese marine and army corps The casualties the Chinese absorbed,in answer to Chiang Kai-shek's call an all-out stand,were staggering.As many as 250,000 Chinese troops ere killed or wounded-almost 60 percent of Chiang's finest forces- hile the Japanese took 40,000 or more casualties. The Japanese finally broke the Chinese lines by making a bold amphib- ous landing at Hangzhou Bay,to the south of Shanghai,and threatening eChinese from the rear.On November 11 the Chinese began to retreat estward,but in such bad order that they failed to hold the carefully pre- red defensive emplacements at Wuxi.Instead they streamed back toward ecapital of Nanjing. Over the centuries,Nanjing had endured its share of armed attacks and esustained propaganda campaigns that accompanied them:the Manchus 1645,the Taiping rebels in 1853,the Qing regional armies in 1864,the publican forces in 1912.Now,in 1937,Chiang Kai-shek pledged that Nanjing would never fall,but he entrusted its defense to a Guomindang olitician and former warlord,Tang Shengzhi,whose main claim to Chiang's faith was that he had led his troops in Hunan in the summer of 26 to support Chiang's Northern Expedition plans.Tang's distinguishing ture was the abiding faith he held in his Buddhist spiritual adviser,whom had used in the past to indoctrinate his troops in the ways of loyalty,and a source of advice on career decisions.This Buddhist now advised Tang accept the task of directing the city's defense,and Tang did so after the ght from Shanghai was in full swing.As the Japanese bombarded the city ith leaflets promising decent treatment of all civilians remaining there, keptical Chinese troops-fugitives from the Shanghai fighting-killed and bbed the people of Nanjing to obtain civilian clothing and make good eir escape.On December 12 Tang himself abandoned the city;since he d vowed publicly to defend Nanjing to the last breath,he made no plans orthe orderly evacuation of the garrison troops there,and his departure orsened the military confusion. There followed in Nanjing a period of terror and destruction that must ank among the worst in the history of modern warfare.For almost seven eeks the Japanese troops,who first entered the city on December 13, leashed on the defeated Chinese troops and on the helpless Chinese civil- n population a storm of violence and cruelty that has few parallels.The emale rape victims,many of whom died after repeated assaults,were esti- mated by foreign observers living in Nanjing at 20,000;the fugitive soldiers illed were estimated at 30,000;murdered civilians at 12,000.Other contem-
424WAR AND REVOLUTION porary Chinese estimates were as much as ten times higher,and it is difficu to establish exact figures.Certainly robbery,wanton destruction,and arso left much of the city in ruins,and piles of dead bodies were observablei countless locations.There is no obvious explanation for this grim event no perhaps can one be found.The Japanese soldiers,who had expected cas victory,instead had been fighting hard for months and had taken infinitel higher casualties than anticipated.They were bored,angry,frustrated,tired The Chinese women were undefended,their menfolk powerless or absen The war,still undeclared,had no clear-cut goal or purpose.Perhaps Chinese regardless of sex or age seemed marked out as victims. While the violence raged in Nanjing,the surviving Nationalist armi withdrew up the Yangzi to the west,with the goal of consolidating Wuhan,site of the opening salvos of the birth of the republic and later s of the Communists'brightest hopes.Fighting continued in central Chi throughout the first half of 1938.The string of Japanese victoriesw checked only occasionally,as at the southern Shandong town of Taie zhuang near the major railway junction of Xuzhou.Here in April,Li Zo ren,one of Chiang's best generals,fought a brilliant battle,luringth Japanese army into a trap and killing as many as 30,000 of its combat troo proving to the world that with inspired leadership and good weaponst Chinese could hold their own.But he could not sustain the victory and h to retreat.Xuzhou fell to the Japanese in May. As the Japanese advanced yet f rther west to the ancient capital of K feng,which would win them control of the crucial railroad leading sou to Wuhan,Chiang Kai-shek ordered his engineers to blow up the dikes the Yellow River.The ensuing giant flood stalled the Japanese for the Zheng THE WAR IN CENTRAL CHNA.1937-1938 uzhou ●★aMay1938) J IAN G S U Nanjing ★ Shanghai ●★(Aug0ct.1937) HUBE Chinese (carly 1938 Wuha (1te31938 ember195罗 apanese forc 898 ZHEJIANG ng Lake
WORL D WAR I I 425 ths,destroyed more than 4,000 north China villages,and killed own numbers of local peasants.The destruction of the dikes changed course of the Yellow River,which since the 1850s had flowed into the wSea north of the Shandong peninsula.Now the waters again fol- dthe southerly course and flowed across the northern part of Jiangsu ore reaching the ocean. By the late summer of 1938,however,the Japanese had assembled the s tanks,and artillery needed for the final assault on the tricity area of han.Fighting took place at scores of locations north and east of the city amost five months.The Japanese brought reinforcements by rail from north,and by convoys of armored boats along the Yangzi,which they matically cleared of Nationalist defense positions.Once they had embled the vessels needed to sweep Boyang Lake,which the Nationalists mined,they also were in a position to attack Wuhan from the south. The tricities might have fallen far sooner had it not been for the heroic ons of the Russian pilots sent to China by Stalin,whose renewed concern Nationalist China's survival could be traced to the anti-Comintern alli- of Germany and Japan.The Russian flyers'main base was at Lanzhou Gansu,where they received supplies brought by truck and camel over old Silk Road;in several pitched air battles-and on occasion through aning ruses-they inflicted severe damage on the Japanese air force. But by late October 1938 much of Wuhan was in ruins.Chiang Kai-shek, ohad readied yet another wartime base,this time deep beyond the angzi gorges in the Sichuan city of Chongqing(Chungking),was flown of the city to safety there,while those troops who could do so commenced ir retreat.The Japanese took over the ravaged area on October 25,1938, ing(according to Chinese estimates)sustained 200,000 casualties and lost ore than 100 planes.Only four days before,Japanese marine and naval ts had landed and seized Canton.Chiang Kai-shek had now lost de facto ntrol over the whole swathe of eastern China stretching from the passes Shanhaiguan to the rich ports in the semitropical south,along with all wealthy commercial and industrial cities lying in between.The area compassed the most fertile of China's farmland and the ancient cultural eartland of the country. CHINA DIVIDED By 1938 the great expanse of territory that had once been a unified empire ander the Qing was fragmented into ten separate major units:Manchukuo, the Inner Mongolian Federation,northeast China south of the Great Wall
426 WAR AND REVOLUTION east-central China,and Taiwan-all controlled in varying degrees b Japan-as well as the Guomindang regime in Chongqing,and the Com munist base in Shaanxi.In addition,much of Shanxi province,especially around Taiyuan,remained in the hands of the warlord ruler Yan Xishan Japanese-occupied Canton constituted yet another separate zone of author ity,as did the great far-western expanse of Xinjiang.Here the predomi nantly Muslim population was controlled by an autonomous military governor who nervously sought aid and sponsorship first from Soviet Russ and then from the Guomindang.Tibet,too,had reasserted its independence Although China since 1911 had grown used to political fragmentatio and civil war,this partial reconsolidation into large units,many as big as bigger than whole countries,seemed to renew the threat that the pressure of foreign imperialism had posed in the late nineteenth century-that Chin might end up permanently divided.The solidification of such a group new states would return China to the situation that had prevailed before the Qin conquests of 221 B.C.,during the so-called Warring States period when ten major regimes controlled the country among them;or it migh bring a recurrence of the shifting patterns of authority and alliances tha typified China's history from the third to sixth century A.D.,and again from the tenth to the thirteenth. The fall of Wuhan in late 1938 marked the end of Japan's first concerted assault on China,for the Japanese War Ministry's carlier plan to hold ceiling of 250,000 Japanese combat troops in China had not proved feasible and there was now a danger of becoming seriously overextended.Japan's goal in its China operations was to win an extensive base of natural resources that would fuel further industrial development-both for civil and militar purposes-and to expand the"new order"in Asia under Japan's cultural leadership,a dream of the Japanese for forty years.There was no intentio of tying down the cream of the Japanese army in a protracted occupation of all China;rather the plan was to develop an interlocking network of puppet regimes,on the model of Manchukuo,that would give Japan pref erential economic treatment,be staunchly anti-Communist,and provide the puppet troops that would garrison and patrol their own territories in Japan's name.Japanese planners also hoped that by fragmenting China's economy further,and especially by weakening the comparatively successful fabi cur- rency that the Nationalists had set up in reforms of 1935,Japan would undermine what little was left of China's financial stability.Without a decent financial base,the Chongqing regime would surely capitulate. Japan's original puppet state,Manchukuo,which had been formed between 1932 and 1934,underwent rapid industrial and military expansion
W ORLD W AR I I 427 SOVIET UNION 9u工s40的 MONGOLIA Sea of XINJIANG Japan KOREA Control JAPAN QINGHAI Yan'ani过 Japanese Control Reformed Government TIBET Shanghai East GMD.Control Cb射立 TAIWAN Sea INDIA BURMA REsC INDOCHINA CHINA DIVIDED N Sonth China 1938 Sea THAILAND Formation of a second puppet state in Inner Mongolia,spearheaded by the Manchukuo armies in conjunction with Mongol troops and the Japanese. had initially been stalled by tough Chinese resistance.But after the crisis at Xi'an in 1936 and the attack on Shanghai in 1937,the Japanese strategy was to appease the powers of a rising Mongolian nationalism.Chiang Kai-shek had always refused to do this,fearing the area's complete secession from China.Bolder,the Japanese formed a Federated Autonomous Government under the leadership of a Mongol prince,aided by a Japanese "supreme adviser." This new government was given control of the two provinces of Suiyuan and Chahar,as well as the northern section of Shanxi province around Datong,formerly dominated by the warlord Yan Xishan.With its capital in Kalgan,the new regime was linked economically by the Kalgan-Datong- Baotou railway line,and was designed to exploit the iron and coal resources of the region as well as develop the production of electrical power.The Japanese encouraged certain aspects of Mongolian nationalism by such devices as dating documents back to the era of the warrior-ruler Genghis Khan.But the incorporation of the population of northern Shanxi into the
428WAR AND REVOLUTION Federated Autonomous Government meant that the already small Mon- golian population was swamped by Han Chinese.Of the 5.25 million people who formed its constituency,over 5 million,or 95 percent,were Chinese the Mongols accounted for 154,000,and the rest were Uighurs from the Xinjiang region,Koreans,or Japanese. In mid-December 1937,while the rape of Nanjing was occurring,the Japanese army in north China moved to consolidate the various"councils" and "autonomous governments"south of the Wall into a third puppet regime,named the Provisional Government of the Republic of China.To serve as chairman of the new government's executive committee,the Japa- nese installed a former Qing dynasty juren degree holder,diplomat,and banker,Wang Kemin,who had been the Young Marshal Zhang Xueliang's financial adviser.This puppet government,with its base in Peking,worked closely with the newly formed North China Development Company to develop systematically a wide range of industries that had previously been managed by such Japanese corporations as Mitsui,Mitsubishi,Taido electric and Asahi glass.With a capitalization of 350 million yen,the new company spun off subsidiaries such as the North China Transportation,Telephone. and Telegraph Companies,and took over responsibility for the area's iron and coal mines,steelworks,and harbor facilities. Once Nanjing had fallen,the Japanese also moved to install a fourth puppet regime,this time for central China.It was hard to find any Chinese leaders of caliber willing to take the job,especially since it meant collabo- rating with those hated Japanese officers believed to have given full license to their troops during the Nanjing atrocities.But eventually another Qing juren-degree holder,Liang Hongzhi,who had lived in Nagasaki as a child and had served on the staff of the pro-Japanese premier Duan Qirui accepted the post as president of the executive bureau of the new Nanjing- based "reformed government." Like the Peking government,this regime comprised three main bureaus (yuan)and a cluster of subordinate ministries.Permanently short of money. it was forced to rely for much of its income on alliance with the still- powerful gangsters who ran the rackets of Shanghai.The Nanjing govern ment made no serious effort to remove the Guomindang fabi currency from circulation,although with the help of the Japanese it did put steady pressure on the foreign customs service to yield up its share of the collected revenues The British inspector general of the customs held firm for a while,and never gave over the backlog of collected duties;but to the deep disappoint- ment of the Nationalist government in Chongqing,customs officials depos- ited newly collected dues in Japanese banks. Again following precedents in the north,the Japanese established a Cen-