The War of the World: History's Age of Hatred (51 page)

Despite its poor historical reputation, the League of Nations should not be dismissed as a complete failure. Of sixty-six international disputes it had to deal with (four of which had led to open hostilities), it successfully resolved thirty-five and quite legitimately passed back twenty to the channels of traditional diplomacy. It failed to resolve just eleven conflicts. Like its successor the United Nations, it was capable of being effective provided some combination of the great powers – including, it should be emphasized, those, like the United States and the Soviet Union, who were not among its members – had a common interest in its being effective. Remarkably, given Manchuria’s role as an imperial fault line earlier in the century, this was not the case in 1931. So uninterested was Stalin in the Far East at this point that in 1935 he offered to sell the Soviet-owned Chinese Eastern Railway to Japan and to withdraw all Soviet forces to the Amur River. If the Soviets were not interested in Manchuria, it was hard to see why Britain or the United States should be, especially at a time when both were reeling from severe financial crises.

On September 30, 1931, the Council of the League issued a resolution calling for ‘the withdrawal of [Japanese] troops to the railway zone’ where they had originally and legitimately been stationed. However, it set no deadline for this withdrawal and added the caveat that
any reduction in troop numbers should only be ‘in proportion as the safety of the lives and property of Japanese nationals is effectively assured’. Eight days later Japanese planes bombed Jinzhou on Manchuria’s south-western frontier with China proper. On October 24 a new resolution was passed setting November 16 as the date by which the Japanese should withdraw. At the end of that month Japanese ground forces advanced towards Jinzhou. In early December, at the Japanese delegate’s suggestion, the League Council decided to send a commission of inquiry under the chairmanship of the Earl of Lytton, the former Governor of Bengal (and son of the Victorian Viceroy). Without waiting for its report, the US Secretary of State, Henry L. Stimson, warned Japan that the United States would refuse to recognize any separate agreement that Tokyo might reach with China; in his opinion, Japan was acting in breach not only of the Kellogg–Briand Pact signed in Paris in 1928 (under which the signatories had made ‘a frank renunciation of war as an instrument of national policy’) but also of the earlier Nine-Power Agreement to maintain the Open Door system in China.

The Japanese were unimpressed by American ‘non-recognition’. In March 1932 they proclaimed ‘Manchukuo’ as an independent state, with the former Chinese Emperor, Puyi, as its puppet ruler – another initiative by the men on the spot which was ratified by Tokyo only after a six-month delay. A week later Lytton submitted his voluminous report, which dismissed the Japanese claim that Manchukuo was a product of Manchurian self-determination and condemned Japan for ‘forcibly seiz[ing] and occupy[ing]… what was indisputably Chinese territory’. The Japanese pressed on with their policy of conquest. They bombed targets in the province of Rehe in the summer of 1932. In January 1933 there was yet another ‘incident’ at Shanhaiguan, the strategic pass where the Great Wall reaches the sea. After a few days it too was in Japanese hands. A week’s fighting added Rehe to Japan’s domain. In February 1933 the League of Nations Assembly accepted Lytton’s report and endorsed all but unanimously his proposal to give Manchuria a new autonomous status. Once again Japan was politely asked to withdraw her troops. In March the Japanese finally announced their intention to withdraw – from the League. Two months later they concluded a truce with Chinese military representatives
that confirmed Japan’s control over Manchuria and Inner Mongolia. It also created a large demilitarized zone running through Hebei province, which the Japanese were soon running on an informal basis.

It is sometimes said that this was a fatal turning point in the history of the 1930s; the beginning of that policy of appeasement which was to culminate in 1939. But that is to misread the Manchurian crisis. It was unquestionably a turning point in Japan’s domestic politics. But internationally all that had happened was that the Japanese had achieved their long-standing objective of being treated as an equal by the other imperial powers. They were now entitled to expand their colonial territory, but only in regions where the other powers had no interests. When the Japanese sought to flex their muscles in a quite different part of China – the vital port of Shanghai, through which the lion’s share of China’s trade flowed – it was a very different matter. The events of January–May 1932, which saw full-scale fighting between Japanese marines and the Chinese 19th Route Army, elicited a much less accommodating response from Britain and the United States (as well as from France, hitherto the neutral arbiter), leading ultimately to a truce on the basis of the
status quo ante
. Indeed, with the British decision to abandon the Ten-Year Rule in 1932, and the resumption of work on the fortification of Singapore, the prospect before the Japanese was of an increasing Western commitment to Asia, even if in the short term the British had good reason to avoid a military showdown with Japan. There was therefore a faint whiff of hubris about the assertion by Amō Eiji, chief of the intelligence section in the Japanese Foreign Ministry, of a Japanese monopoly of power in Asia analogous to the US monopoly of power in the Americas – in effect, an Asian Monroe Doctrine. This was effectual only in as much as Japanese pressure succeeded in disrupting the efforts of the Guom-indang Finance Minister Song Ziwen, Chiang’s brother-in-law, to secure substantial economic aid from the League of Nations and a loan to purchase American cotton. In other respects it counted for nothing. From 1933 the Chinese were able to rely on military and economic assistance from Nazi Germany. Hitler sent General Hans von Seeckt, who had been in charge of the rump German army after Versailles, as a military adviser to the Nanking government; in 1936 a Chinese–German trade agreement was signed. In 1935 a British
delegation led by the Treasury official Sir Frederick Leith-Ross arrived in China with a scheme to reform the Chinese currency by taking it off the silver standard and pegging it to sterling. So much for the Asian Monroe Doctrine. Nor could the Japanese wholly ignore the possibility that American grumbles about Japanese policy would one day be backed up by naval action. The Japanese decision to abrogate the Washington Naval Treaty in December 1934 was predicated on the idea that Japan should settle for nothing less than naval parity; it overlooked the possibility that without any treaty, the United States might conceivably widen the gap between its navy and Japan’s. The Japanese also had reason to worry about the Soviet Union’s decision to join the League of Nations barely a year after Japan’s decision to leave, and to build up its defences in Eastern Siberia. The interlude of Russian indifference to the Far East was at an end.

In that sense 1931–3 was not a turning point at all; rather, it was the continuation of a Japanese policy of colonization dating back as far as the 1890s. The critical
leitmotif
throughout was the limited use the Japanese made of military force to achieve their conquests. Indeed, compared with 1904–5, the ‘incidents’ of the early 1930s were small-scale affairs, which cost few Japanese lives. In the mid-1930s the Japanese reverted to nineteenth-century British tactics, sending gunboats up the Yangtze to Nanking after their consul temporarily vanished under mysterious circumstances, and to Hankou to protest against anti-Japanese indoctrination by the local Chinese commander. In early 1935 the Kwantung Army staged yet another incident, to oust Chinese troops from Eastern Chahar, to the east of Rehe province. Throughout that year – with a junior officer once again taking the initiative – the whole of Chahar and Hebei provinces were the scenes of repeated incursions by Japanese forces intended to intimidate and undermine the Chinese authorities. Following his appointment as commander of the North China Garrison in the summer of 1935, Lieutenant-General Tada Hayao made no secret of his belief that all of China’s northern provinces should become autonomous, in other words be under Japanese rather than Chinese control. A fresh incident erupted in August 1936, this time in Chengdu in Sichuan, prompting still more extreme Japanese demands. The following month it was the turn of Beihai in southern Kwantung. Throughout the period from
1931 to 1937 the Chinese yielded to virtually all such pressure. Chiang Kai-shek remained true to his maxim, ‘First internal pacification, then external resistance’, concentrating his rhetorical fire on the ‘Red bandits’ (the Communists) rather than the ‘dwarf bandits’ (the Japanese) and insisting that until the ‘internal disease has… been eliminated, the external disorder cannot be cured’. The Japanese, Chiang insisted, represented merely a ‘disease of the skin’; the Communists, by contrast, were a ‘disease of the heart’. Even as the Japanese tightened their grip on Manchuria, fighting raged between Nationalists and Communists, culminating in the protracted campaign to oust the Communists from their Jiangxi stronghold. Meanwhile, bellicose critics of Chiang’s strategy came close to splitting the Guomindang itself. All this seemed merely to vindicate the Japanese claim that China was not an ‘organized state’ deserving of the protection of the League.

Yet China never became so disorganized that the Japanese could take it over lock, stock and barrel; Chiang’s was a policy of appeasement, not capitulation. The fighting in Shanghai in 1932 had revealed that, despite their inferior armaments, the Chinese were capable of holding their own against Japanese forces if they outnumbered them sufficiently; indeed, only the arrival of army reinforcements had averted a Japanese humiliation. The Japanese attack on Suiyuan in November–December 1936 was actually repulsed. Chiang’s conviction was that China needed time to build up its strength. And in many ways it did make sense to fight the relatively amateurish Communists first, rather than the highly professional Japanese. With his odd blend of Confucianism and European authoritarianism – which extended to the sponsorship of a fascistic Blue Shirt movement – Chiang had a coherent strategy. It was all a question of timing. Thus, in launching his New Life Movement in the spring of 1934, he made a prediction to a gathering of Guomindang officials. China, he reiterated, was not yet ready for war with Japan; but a second world war would come in 1936 or 1937, and this would be a war for which China would be ready, and from which China would emerge transformed. He did not know how right he was.

When did the Second World War begin? The usual answer is September 1, 1939, when the Germans invaded Poland. But that is a European answer. The real answer is July 7, 1937, when full-blown war broke out between Japan and China. And it broke out on the outskirts of Beijing – then called Peiping – at Luokouchiao, known in the West as the Marco Polo Bridge.

At first it seemed like just another ‘incident’. Mysterious shots were fired in the night at a company of Japanese troops in the vicinity of the bridge. A Japanese soldier went missing and was wrongly presumed to have been kidnapped (he was actually relieving himself). There were enough Chinese soldiers in the vicinity for the Japanese, as usual, to cry foul, and fighting broke out in the nearby town of Wanp’ing. For a few days it seemed as if the whole thing would blow over with the customary Chinese concession and withdrawal; indeed, an agreement had effectively been reached between the Japanese and Sung Che-yuan, chairman of the local (and more or less autonomous) Hebei-Chahar Political Council. Yet forces on both sides now swept this agreement aside. After much prevarication – the decision was made and cancelled no fewer than four times as rival factions within the army wrangled with one another – the Japanese government ordered three more divisions to northern China and an additional two for Shanghai and Tsingtao. Indeed, the Cabinet went so far as to endorse the idea of autonomy for the whole of North China; in effect, a step in the direction of a Greater Manchukuo. For his part, Chiang had been moving towards a more confrontational stance ever since his break with Wang Jingwei in December 1935, egged on by the militants in the National Salvation Association and other proponents of a united front against the Japanese – not least Zhang Xueliang, the former warlord of Manchuria, who had actually held Chiang captive at Xian until he agreed to a change of policy. Now Chiang mobilized troops on the Honan border. On July 17 he announced that there would be no further diminutions of Chinese sovereignty. Just under a month later the Chinese General Headquarters decreed a general mobilization.

Initially, as the Japanese had expected, the fighting went their way. Within a matter of days, Tongzhou and Peiping had fallen. Given their superiority in machine-guns, mortars and field artillery, the Japanese generally made short work of Chinese riflemen in frontal clashes. The Chinese were further hampered by the mutual distrust between Chiang and his notional subordinates. General Sugiyama Hajime, the Japanese Army Minister, confidently reported to the Emperor that ‘the war could be ended within a month’. Yet expansion beyond Manchuria now exposed the limits of Japanese military power. The Japanese had at most 6,000 men in northern China at the time of the Marco Polo Bridge incident. At the start of the war, the most that the General Staff envisaged committing to China was fifteen divisions. By the end of 1937, however, sixteen divisions had already been sent, bringing the total deployment to 700,000 men, more than a hundred times the number in early July. To be sure, the Japanese continued to gain ground. In September Paoting was sacked, a month later it was the turn of Chengting and by the end of the year the capital itself, Nanking, had been literally raped and pillaged (see
Chapter 14
). In the first year of the war, the Japanese advanced on all fronts, occupying an area of roughly 150,000 square miles, stretching all the way from Inner Mongolia in the north to Hangzhou in the south. Cities as far west as Paotow and Puckow were in Japanese hands, and all China’s ports north of Hangzhou. Yet the Chinese simply withdrew further west, moving their capital first to Hankou and then to Chongqing. By the middle of 1940 Japanese forces in China numbered 23 divisions, 28 brigades (the rough equivalent of an additional 14 divisions) and an air division – around 850,000 men in all. Still victory proved elusive.