Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945 (14 page)

In June 1937, after some six years of Japanese policymakers blowing hot and cold toward China, a new man was appointed as prime minister. It fell to Prince Konoye Fumimaro to decide how to respond to the Marco Polo Bridge incident.

Konoye was an aristocratic civilian with abundant diplomatic experience. He had attended the Paris Peace Conference in 1919 and come away from it convinced that the nations of Asia would never receive a just settlement from the Western powers. Konoye came from one of the noblest families in Japan, so close to the emperor that he even spoke in the rather stilted language that was reserved for the royal family and a few close courtiers. He was a cultured man, who had translated works by Oscar Wilde in his youth, and he had an aristocratic temperament. He rarely held meetings before eleven o’clock in the morning (a stark contrast to Chiang, whose military training and natural asceticism meant that he regularly rose at 5:00 a.m.). Yet Konoye was also a weak man, unable to stand up to people who opposed him. His secretary recalled him as “Hamlet-like” and “lonely.” The aristocratic veteran politician Prince Saionji Kinmochi declared that Konoye lacked the one thing he needed in dealing with the army: “strength”
(chikara)
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Konoye’s first test on the “China question” came just a month after his appointment. He found his cabinet split on the matter of how to respond to the Marco Polo Bridge incident. The senior General Staff officer Mutô Akira and the chief of the military affairs department of the Ministry of War, Tanaka Shin’ichi, advocated an escalation of hostilities: now was the time to strike hard at China and destroy Chiang Kai-shek’s regime. Ishiwara Kanji, who headed the operations division of the General Staff, was much more cautious. This was ironic, as Ishiwara had been the mastermind behind the invasion of Manchuria in 1931, but he now argued that Japan was not ready for war with China, and that opening a war with the Nanjing government might even make Japan more vulnerable to the USSR. One should not exaggerate the difference between the two sides—even “moderates” in the Japanese government believed that China should ultimately come under Japanese influence, but they disagreed on the timing. On July 9 Sugiyama Gen, the minister of war (known as “the toilet door” because it was said by his colleagues that one could push him in any direction, like the door in a Japanese-style bathroom stall), asked for five divisions to be mobilized for deployment in north China. The request was denied—but only for the moment.
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Back at the Marco Polo Bridge, the local Chinese and Japanese commanders were beginning to discuss a cease-fire. The Shanghai press was still trying to determine who was responsible for the incident. “Who started the firing is still not clear,” the
North-China Daily News
of July 10 declared, “but it is considered probable that the Chinese, guarding the railway bridge-head, seeing an armed party advancing along the embankment in the dark, challenged them and on receiving no reply, opened fire, thinking them to be plain-clothes men or Japanese staging a real attack.”
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But by now, the fate of a bridge near Beiping was beside the point. The leaders of both China and Japan were seeing the events through a much wider lens. On July 10 Chiang noted: “The Japanese have attacked at Lugouqiao, but their goals don’t stop there. We’ve already sent troops north; perhaps we can restrain their ambitions.” He went on: “If we don’t show preparation and determination, then we can’t resolve this peacefully.”
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On July 11 an American diplomat met He Yingqin, Chiang’s minister of war, and asked him whether the confrontation at Lugouqiao meant war. He Yingqin replied that it was up to the Japanese, and that if they continued their “bandit methods” then war would be inevitable. The diplomat put it to He that “even at a sacrifice” it was worth postponing war for a couple of years to strengthen preparations. But He was firm: it would be hard to know exactly when China was truly ready, and if they were attacked, then they would fight.
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It was not just the Americans who urged caution on Chiang. Plenty of his colleagues did too. Wang Jingwei had spent most of the 1930s trying to find a way to avoid war with Japan. Now he advised Chiang not to escalate the conflict. Another voice advocating patience belonged to Zhou Fohai. In 1937 Zhou was deputy director of propaganda for the Nationalists. But he had taken a tortuous path to get there; as a young man, Zhou had been a founding member of the Chinese Communist Party, but had swiftly left it to join the Nationalists. Even so, he retained friendships with prominent Communists. When one of the CCP’s founders, Chen Duxiu, was released from prison in August 1937, Zhou was one of his first visitors. However, during the Nanjing decade, his politics drifted much more closely toward Wang Jingwei’s. Within a few months, their association would have huge consequences for both men.

In the days after fighting broke out on July 7, Zhou was on his way to join Chiang at Lushan. On arrival, he wrote in his diary: “I fear that an external issue will evolve into a domestic issue, which makes it harder for the central government to deal with. I’m disappointed.”
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Even as he took in the atmosphere at Lushan, Zhou continued to hope that matters would be settled peacefully. The mood was convivial, as he attended a banquet given jointly by Chiang and Wang. Even though resistance was discussed at a meeting on July 17, there did not seem to be a desire for war. “About seven people spoke,” Zhou noted, “but none of them was impressive.” The next day, he wrote that he had heard that the Japanese ambassador to China, Kawagoe Shigeru, had been in contact with the Chinese Foreign Ministry, trying to calm the situation down and frame the conflict as a regional matter. “Based on this,” Zhou wrote with a sense of hope, “I reckon the incident won’t expand.”
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Zhou also took the opportunity to greet “old friends” in Lushan, although the term was laced with a certain irony. For these friends were the CCP leaders Zhou Enlai and Lin Boqu, whom he had first come to know in the days of the first United Front. In less then twenty years, the twists and turns of Chinese politics had meant that Zhou Fohai was now firmly allied with Chiang and Wang, until very recently sworn enemies of the CCP and all it stood for. Although they were all temporarily united against the new enemy, the fundamental differences between them could not be resolved even by long-standing friendships. Still, Zhou hoped that war might be put off, at least for a while.

But Chiang wrote in his diary on July 19 that he would not back down:

Everyone believes it’s dangerous to make a public declaration of war . . . but to turn danger into safety, this is the only way . . . I don’t care about safety or danger; this is our very last remedy against the Japanese dwarfs. But only my wife agrees with me.
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As events escalated in July 1937, the Marco Polo Bridge fighting began to resemble the shooting of the Archduke Franz Ferdinand at Sarajevo in June 1914. It was not inevitable that that particular incident would escalate into continental war. But if it had not, the balance of power and wider tensions within Europe would probably have precipitated war shortly afterward. In the same way, even if the fighting near Beiping had been resolved at a local level, it had become clear that China and Japan were heading toward conflict sooner rather than later. From July 7, events would no longer be driven by patched-up deals between local Chinese strongmen and trigger-happy Japanese officers tussling with each other in towns and villages in Hebei and Chahar provinces. Instead, the national capitals—Nanjing and Tokyo—would make the decisions that would commit their nations to war or peace.

Far away, in Washington, DC, the Chinese ambassador to the US, the former premier and foreign minister Wang Zhengting (C. T. Wang), held a luncheon at his home in Twin Oaks for Stanley K. Hornbeck, the State Department’s top specialist on East Asian affairs and a close adviser to Secretary of State Cordell Hull. Also present on that afternoon of July 10 was H. H. Kung, China’s minister of finance (and Chiang’s brother-in-law). Hornbeck made a comment that was flattering, but that also constituted a warning. He acknowledged the modernization of China under the Nationalists, and observed that progress in “finance, in road building, in railway construction” meant that “in general, things in China seemed to be going along extraordinarily well.” Therefore, he wondered aloud, would it not be better “to continue along this course of concentrating its attention and energies upon reconstructive effort rather than for China to start arguments with foreign governments?” If China just took more time to strengthen itself, then other powers would have to take the Chinese position seriously. Hornbeck had a point. Just a few days earlier, Kung had been persuading a group of New York investors that the new Nationalist China was a sound place for their investments: “China is no longer the disunited, disorderly China of the war lord days.”
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But now, Kung quickly shot back with a rather different message. “China was preparing for what he felt was an inevitable war with Japan,” Hornbeck reported, inevitable because with each year, “Japan would become as compared with China comparatively stronger.” Wang and Kung both made a prescient observation: “some day the United States would have to face Japanese aggression, unless that aggression should be checked by China”; therefore, the US should help China now.
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But Hornbeck, while sympathetic, was careful to point out that the US would only intervene where its own national interests were at stake. It was clear that as far as the US government was concerned, Japanese aggression in China was not a priority issue in the summer of 1937.

Meanwhile, the temperature rose in Tokyo. On July 11 Prince Konoye announced at a press conference that Japan was mobilizing troops in north China. Ironically, on the same day, the local Chinese and Japanese commanders announced that they had agreed on a cease-fire. But it was no longer a local issue; Chiang’s decision to move troops northward had become a signal for the Ministry of War to dispatch troops from Korea and Manchuria. Japanese public opinion was now in a frenzy. Three days later, Konoye addressed a meeting of prefectural governors. In his remarks he advised the Japanese public to be ready for the “worst eventuality.” “Our strenuous efforts to reach an amicable settlement of the north China incident have to all appearances failed,” Konoye declared. “Thus, the lives and properties of our co-nationals in Peiping, Tientsin, and the neighboring areas are in danger.” The minister of war, General Sugiyama Gen, added that the “real cause” of the affair was “the anti-Japanese campaign and education, strenuously carried on by the Nanking government for years.”
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A spokesman for the Kwantung Army added his own menace: “We are prepared to resort to the most extreme measures if further provocation is given.” As the Kwantung Army had occupied Manchuria in a lightning strike in 1931, this was a warning worth heeding.
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The Chinese government made it abundantly clear that it was mobilizing for a major war. On July 13 “large-scale air-raid defence manoeuvres designed to test the immunity of the Peiping–Hankow and the Lunghai Railways to air raids” were staged in Zhengzhou, in central China. A few days later, practice gave way to reality, as it was reported that “Japanese military planes . . . made three separate attacks on Chinese trains at various points on the Peiping–Hankow Railway.”
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The Chinese public was becoming increasingly incensed. Shanghai’s civil society began to demand resistance to the Japanese: “Numerous Chinese public bodies here dispatched telegrams to the 29th Army in the north, expressing their sympathy and urging the soldiers to defend the country . . . The Civic Association, the Chinese Bankers Association, the Native Bankers Association, and the Chinese Chamber of Commerce have sent $1,000 to the defenders of Lukouchiao [Luguoqiao].”
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Even small incidents could suddenly flare up. The tensions between the two sides meant that a dispute between a Chinese rickshaw driver and a Japanese client over a fare in early July led to mob violence in Shanghai.
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By late July the situation had moved far beyond a few locally garrisoned soldiers taking potshots at each other. Japan’s Imperial Army Staff headquarters gave orders to mobilize, while offering its final ultimatums to Chiang’s government. The increasingly worried Shanghai community observed the lines being drawn in north China:

Although it was at first hoped that the Sino-Japanese crisis was yielding to moderating influences, the situation developed on July 18 on unfavourable lines . . . It was felt that the next two days would see the issues of peace or war decided . . . In a virtual ultimatum, delivered to the Nanking government at 11.30 o’clock last night, Japan requested the immediate cessation of “provocative activities” as well as the discontinuance of “interference” with the execution by the local authorities of the terms for a settlement of the Lukouchiao incident of July 7.
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The Japanese were reluctant to declare war openly. But they wanted to neutralize China fast, and they hoped that they still had a chance to confine the conflict to the north: the Japanese Army had stated in a resolution that its aims were to eliminate the northern Chinese armies “in one go,” and occupy the region north of the city of Baoding, some 140 kilometers south of Beiping.
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At the disposal of the Japanese was the Kwantung Army, along with local forces that would either collaborate with them or at least not stand in their way, some 130,000 troops in total or more.
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