The Road to War

The Second Sino-Japanese War did not begin on July 7, 1937. It began six years earlier, on September 18, 1931, when officers of Japan's Kwantung Army staged a fake sabotage of a Japanese railway near Mukden in Manchuria and used it as a pretext to seize the entire region — without authorization from the civilian government in Tokyo. The Manchurian Incident, as it was called, established the terrifying pattern that would define the decade: Japan's military acting unilaterally, presenting the government with faits accomplis, and expanding Japan's continental footprint one engineered provocation at a time. The League of Nations condemned Japan. Japan withdrew from the League. Manchuria became 'Manchukuo,' a puppet state under the last Qing emperor Pu Yi. The international community did nothing that mattered.

China in 1931 was not the unified nation the word implies. Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist government nominally controlled the country after his Northern Expedition of 1926–1928, but the reality was a mosaic of warlord fiefdoms, semi-autonomous regional armies, Japanese-controlled Manchuria, and a growing Communist insurgency in the interior. Chiang's response to the Manchurian seizure was to do nothing militarily — he had calculated that resisting Japan while the Communists remained undefeated was strategically impossible. His policy of 'internal pacification before external resistance' outraged the Chinese public and many of his own officers, but his analysis was not entirely wrong: China's armies in 1931 were no match for Japan's. The problem was that the six years of 'pacification' he needed did not make China strong enough to match Japan either.

The full war finally came through a characteristically ambiguous incident at the Marco Polo Bridge outside Peking on July 7, 1937. Japanese troops on night maneuvers claimed a soldier was missing and demanded entry to the nearby Chinese town of Wanping. The Chinese garrison refused. Shots were fired — by whom, in what order, for what purpose, remains disputed. Local commanders on both sides negotiated a ceasefire. But in Tokyo and Nanjing, neither government could afford to back down. Within weeks, both sides had committed forces that made full-scale war inevitable. Japan had not planned for a war it believed would last three months. China had not planned for a war it knew it could not win by conventional means. Both were about to discover what they had actually begun.

The Battle of Shanghai, which erupted in August 1937 after Chiang Kai-shek decided to force the conflict into the international settlement to attract Western intervention, demonstrated both the terms of the war and its likely trajectory. Chiang committed his best German-trained divisions — the cream of the modern Nationalist army, troops equipped and advised by German military experts hired precisely for this kind of conventional warfare. For three months they fought Japanese forces in the streets, rice paddies, and reinforced positions of the Yangtze delta. China fought brilliantly and at enormous cost. When it was over, China had inflicted 40,000 Japanese casualties — more than Japan had suffered in the entire Russo-Japanese War. And China's best army was destroyed. The war's terrible mathematics were established: China could make Japan bleed, but it could not stop the advance. What it could do — what Chiang had calculated from the start — was refuse to die.