Click here to read the original Cautious Optimism Facebook post with comments
7 MIN READ - The Cautious Optimism Correspondent for Economic Affairs continues his history of China series outlining the general chronology of the Second Sino-Japanese War, better known as World War II.
Photo: IJA Chinese territorial gains by 1940. Note that nearly every major Chinese city is occupied including Beijing, Tianjin, Shenyang, Shanghai, Nanjing, Hangzhou, Wuhan Guangzhou, Fuzhou, and Xiamen. Only Hong Kong—British territory that Japan would take in late 1941—and the remote Sichuan cities of Chengdu and Chongqing remain under Nationalist (KMT) control.
In the last column the Economics Correspondent planned to post one column summarizing the main events of World War II in China followed by one more on the aftermath effects for the rival Nationalist and Communist factions.
But upon writing it’s become clear that even a highly abridged version of the war with Japan will require more than a single column, so today’s article will be the first of two on the subject.
The Economics Correspondent doesn’t claim to know each and every battle between Chinese and Japanese forces during World War II. Like a lot of Americans he’s always been more interested in the battles between the U.S. and Japan, or between the Allies and Nazi Germany. The military campaigns in China were mostly land battles with infantry, limited armor—particularly on the Chinese side—and modest air support when compared to the European theater or great carrier battles of the Pacific.
In China, historians record 22 major battles from 1937 to 1945, defined as involving at least 100,000 soldiers. And China lost them all until mid-1945 at which point Japan was already nearly defeated by American naval blockades and strategic bombing.
FULL BLOWN INVASION
Just as it had during the invasion of Manchuria, Japan manufactured another pretext for invading the Chinese mainland in 1937: the so-called Marco Polo Bridge Incident.
On July 7, 1937 the IJA demanded to cross the Marco Polo Bridge border just outside Beiping to look for a missing solider (who had already returned to his unit the night before). When Chinese troops guarding their side of the bridge refused, the Japanese shelled their garrison and quickly moved 180,000 troops and armor into the area. Within two weeks the IJA had taken most of the Beiping and Tianjin areas.
The Marco Polo Bridge Incident marks the official start of Japan’s invasion of China proper.
Side note: Beijing was the capital of China during the Ming and Qing dynasties. The words “bei” and “jing” in mandarin mean “north” and “capital.”
However in 1928 Chiang Kai-shek moved the Nationalist Chinese capital south to Nanjing (“south capital”) and consequently Beijing was renamed Beiping or “northern peace.” When the CCP won the Chinese civil war in 1949 they moved the capital back north and the city was once again named Beijing.
CHINA RETREATS
From 1931 to 1937 Chiang Kai-shek had pleaded with the public that China wasn’t ready for all-out war with Japan and his predictions proved correct. Nationalist forces were generally no match for Japan’s modernized army which rapidly moved south down the eastern coast and was already threatening to take Shanghai by the fall of 1937.
It didn’t help that Chiang is also considered by historians to be a poor military commander. Chiang often gave contradictory orders and he frequently countermanded his field commanders without telling them, leading to confusion on the front lines.
While Chiang adopted a strategy of organized retreat when confronted with superior enemy firepower—a rational enough strategy—he sometimes impulsively threw divisions of his best troops at the Japanese to fight for strategically unimportant but symbolically prestigious objectives.
One of these times was the Battle of Shanghai. In fact, of the 22 major battles between China and Japan, the most consequential were at the war’s beginning as their outcomes laid the critical foundation for a large-scale Japanese occupation and eventual stalemate for the remainder of the war.
At Shanghai Chiang Kai-shek threw his best, crack German-trained KMT troops into the battle and put up a much tougher resistance than the Japanese had anticipated. Japanese generals predicted conquering the city within days, but the fighting lasted three months, eventually becoming door-to-door in what was the largest urban battle of World War II before Stalingrad.
Chiang’s initial decision to commit his elite divisions was logical as it bought time for the Nationalist government to plan and execute a retreat from the nearby capital of Nanjing. The KMT also needed time to deconstruct and relocate a great deal of its industrial capacity. However once that objective was met Chiang ordered his crack units to keep fighting to the death and the KMT’s best soldiers were eventually annihilated.
Chiang could have ordered retreat and preserved much of his most capable forces. The government’s retreat was by then well underway, but he still insisted on fighting as long as possible. Reason? Shanghai was the fifth largest city in the world with a large presence of westerners and western investment. Chiang hoped that keeping the battle alive in the world press would gain sympathy from the western powers who would intervene on China’s behalf.
The west didn’t come to China’s aid and the Battle of Shanghai kneecapped Chiang’s fighting capacity for the remainder of the war.
As KMT troops fell back inland the Japanese pursued. Many sought revenge for the losses they had suffered at the hands of the stubborn Chinese. By the time the IJA reached the Nationalist capital of Nanjing (Nanking in Wade-Giles Romanization) their troops went berserk and carried out the six week-long “Rape of Nanking.”
The Correspondent doesn’t want to go into detail about the specific atrocities at Nanking. Facebook would probably censor or deboost this article based on the explicit nature of a detailed description anyway. But readers are encouraged to do a little research of their own including, for those who want to do more than just a little, reading the late Iris Chang’s book “The Rape of Nanking” (1997) which is credited for popularizing the previously little-known subject with western audiences.
A shorter summary of the Nanking atrocities, which surpassed the Nazis for brutality and sadism, is available on Wikipedia at:
The Rape of Nanking is just one of countless atrocities carried out by the IJA upon Chinese civilians during the eight year war, but it’s the most famous in the west.
MORE RETREAT AND STALEMATE
Outgunned and having lost his best troops, Chiang Kai-shek borrowed a strategy from the Russians during Napoleon’s time: trading land for time.
Chiang knew China was so large there was no way Japan could control all of it. It would take the deployment of millions of Japanese soldiers and several years just to hold key areas and their supply lines would be thinly stretched. In the meantime Chiang hoped that foreign military help would come to the rescue.
The IJA in turn was smart enough not to attempt to occupy every square inch of China, limiting itself to key coastal regions and major commercial corridors such as major cities along the Yangtze River. This left the countryside mostly unoccupied which provided fertile ground for Chinese communist guerilla operations.
By late 1938 the Nationalist government had retreated all the way to Chungking (modern pinyin: Chongqing) in the western Sichuan basin, making the remote city the provisional capital where it remained until 1945.
During its 1938 retreat the KMT destroyed Yellow River dykes in a defensive scorched earth campaign. The flooding and destruction stopped the advance of the Japanese in the north, but drowned up to 90,000 Chinese civilians and 500,000 more died in the ensuing famine. Later the Chinese communists, also operating out of northern China, used the disaster area as a successful recruiting ground against both the Japanese and the Nationalist government.
The Sichuan basin was surrounded by mountains and its isolation made the provisional capital of Chungking difficult to capture. Japanese ground forces were unable to concoct any serious threat at taking the city. All they could accomplish was aerial bombardment and holding the Nationalist government in check while they went about exploiting the Chinese mainland.
On another side note, Japan invented and carried out the first civilian firebombing in history and its target was—you guessed it—the provisional capital of Chungking. This version of strategic bombing would later be adopted by the U.S. Army Air Force on an immeasurably larger scale when U.S. B-29’s virtually incinerated most of the Japanese home islands' cities in 1945.
However, when reading through many historian condemnations of America's cruelty there’s rarely any mention that Japan pioneered the tactic years prior on Chinese civilians. There’s also little mention of the concept of karma.
Chiang’s retreat to Chungking certainly provided geographic protection from the IJA, but it also isolated the KMT. The primary coastal cities and commercial corridors like the Yangtze River were cut off as were the tax revenues they generated. The KMT government was increasingly forced to use the printing press for war finance and high inflation plagued Nationalist-controlled China through 1945 and into the Nationalist-Communist Civil War.
Chiang was also cut off from his urban political base and the Sichuan basin was marginally controlled by warlords, leading to political isolation as well.
Ultimately both sides settled into a stalemate with Japan controlling most of the important cities and coastal areas. The ever opportunistic Wang Jingwei, Chiang’s former KMT rival, was installed as president of a subordinate Chinese puppet government, and Japan resorted to frequent bombing of the provisional capital while waiting for the Nationalist government to collapse, but it didn’t.
Wang Jingwei is roundly considered a traitor to Chinese of all persuasions, but in 1944 he left for medical treatment in Japan for an injury he had incurred from a failed assassination attempt in 1939.
Wang died in November 1944 which was probably a blessing for him. The Allies would almost certainly have extradited him to China where the Chiang Kai-shek government would have executed him along with many other convicted wartime traitors.
Stay tuned for the closing chapter of the war in the next installment.
No comments:
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.