Summary: In the previous three chapters of this series we recalled Japan’s April Revolution of 1916 and the massacre of the Japanese imperial family at the revolution’s end; the new regime’s barbaric crackdown on religious and political dissenters in the first years of the post-revolutionary era; and the rise in tensions between Japan and China in the late 1920s and early ‘30s. In this installment we’ll look back at the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War in late 1930 and the savage People’s Air Corps bombing raids on Shanghai and Nanking six months later.

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The warning signs that Sino-Japanese tensions were about to explode into full-blown war had been coming in a steady stream for months, but it was during the summer of 1930 when the mutual animosity between China and the Japanese People’s Republic truly began to spiral towards outright armed conflict. In late June an incident between Chinese and Japanese troops along the Manchurian border provoked the Kagamoto regime to recall its ambassador in Nanking and expel China’s ambassador in Tokyo; just three weeks later Chinese naval gunboats fired on and nearly sank a Japanese fishing trawler off Hainan Island. The dust had barely started to settle from the gunboat episode when Japan abruptly quit the League of Nations in protest over the League’s approval of a resolution that called for an inquiry into the Manchurian border skirmish. A Russian journalist covering the resolution vote observed to one of his colleagues that “today Japan fights the world with boycotts, tomorrow she will be fighting it with bombs.”

The Japanese People’s Army and Navy were continuing to expand this whole time, not only in anticipation of the coming war with China but also in preparation for what Tokyo deemed an inevitable showdown with its two greatest Pacific rivals, the United States and Great Britain. The United States in particular, despite the isolationist attitudes of many of its people at the time, loomed large in the Kagamoto regime’s strategic calculations as the main obstacle to its ultimate goal of dominating the Pacific region. American industrial capacity in particular was a major concern to Kagamoto’s military advisors; a top secret memorandum drafted just after the Hainan Island incident expressed grave fears Japan would be at a severe disadvantage against the U.S. in a protracted war between the two nations when it came to producing the equipment and weapons necessary to prosecute such a war.

On August 1st a Chinese civilian transport aircraft that had strayed into Korean airspace was shot down by Japanese fighters stationed in Korea as part of the mutual defense pact between the Japanese People’s Republic and what was now known(laughably, most outside observers would have said) as the Korean Democratic Union. The Liberation Society regime in Tokyo, along with its mouthpieces in Seoul, asserted the Chinese plane had been on a spy mission for the Chiang Kai-Shek government; the Chinese themselves said that the plane was a passenger aircraft that had simply gone off course by mistake and accused the Japanese-Korean alliance of cold-blooded murder. Whatever slim hope there may have been of achieving even a semblance of a diplomatic solution to the tensions between Nanking and Tokyo was destroyed along with the passenger plane, and Chiang and Kagamoto would soon go from brandishing rifles to loading and aiming them.

Within less than two weeks of the passenger plane attack, Japan and China had severed diplomatic relations. The armed forces of both countries spent the latter half of August and most of September making hurried final preparations for what was now viewed by their leaders as an inevitable war for China’s future. Chiang was determined to resist Japanese attempts to subjugate his country, even if it took a hundred years to defeat Japan; Kagamoto was equally determined to see China crushed under the Liberation Society’s bootheel, or at least weakened enough to the point where it could no longer interfere much with the Society’s expansionist agenda in the Far East.

By the beginning of September most foreign governments, including the United States, had evacuated nonessential personnel and dependents from their embassies in Nanking and were in the process of mounting similar evacuation efforts at their legations in Tokyo. Although few people had any idea where or when the fighting would start, it was all too clear already that the coming Sino-Japanese war would be a bloody one indeed, rivaling if not surpassing the carnage of the 1903 Russo- Japanese War or World War I. Indeed, no less a figure than Alexander Kerensky’s army chief of staff General Georgi Zhukov openly predicted that combined battle casualties for both sides would surpass 20,000 dead and 50,000 wounded or missing within the first forty-eight hours after the shooting began.

Gen. Zhukov knew whereof he spoke: a former Imperial Russian Army cavalry officer who had stayed on to help Kerensky shape doctrine and tactics for the new Russian Federal Army after the Russo-Japanese War ended, Zhukov had seen considerable action on the Korean front during that conflict and lost three of his closest friends to enemy fire in the fight to take Wonsan. In a memo to Kerensky dated September 7th, he alerted the Russian premier to the possibility that Moscow might get drawn into the coming Sino-Japanese hostilities and warned that “stern measures” needed to be taken to bring the Federal Army’s Far Eastern divisions up to snuff if they were going to face the Japanese People’s Army on anything even close to equal terms.

For Japanese war minister Hideki Tojo, confronting the Russians was decidedly a secondary priority at that moment. While it was true that Russo-Japanese relations were approaching their lowest point since the 1903 war, his main focus was on subduing China; he wouldn’t worry about the Russian army unless and until they began to directly challenge Tokyo’s plans for conquest. Not that he was totally ignoring the Russians, however-- his war plans for the first phase of the joint Korean-Japanese invasion of China included provisions for elements of the Japanese People’s Army reserve to be deployed along the coast of Japan’s northern islands in order to forestall any attempt on Moscow’s part to mount an amphibious landing on Hokkaido.

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The straw that broke the camel’s back for the Kagamoto regime regarding China came on September 29th, 1930 when Japanese troops on patrol along the Korean border as part of Japan’s mutual defense pact with Korea came under fire from what official government accounts said was a Chinese army machine gun nest specifically placed on the China- Korea frontier to attack Japanese and Korean soldiers without warning or provocation. The Chinese foreign ministry was quick to dispute this accusation, charging Japan had faked the incident so it would have an excuse to attack China; historical evidence uncovered since Japan’s present democratic government was established nearly two decades ago suggests the border patrol may have been victims of a “friendly fire” mistake by one of the Japanese army’s own machine gunners who confused the patrol for a detachment of Chinese soldiers.

Two days later Kagamoto, in a fiery radio address to his people that is still vividly remembered decades later, announced the People’s Republic of Japan was declaring war on China “in the interest of self- defense of our beloved nation”. At the conclusion of Kagamoto’s speech Mitsuharu Yamagida, his chief deputy and eventual successor, gave war minister Hideki Tojo the order to commence the invasion of China; Tojo in turn telegraphed his army’s generals in Korea with instructions to launch their troops across the Korean-Chinese border.

In the early morning hours of October 2nd, 1930 thousands of Japanese and Korean soldiers rolled across the Korean-Chinese border, catching the Chinese army off-guard and forcing Chiang Kai-Shek to hastily rush three relatively inexperienced cavalry divisions to the invasion zone in a desperate attempt to stem the tide of the assault. Two of those divisions were wiped out to the last man and the third was forced to pull back with heavy losses; their retreat opened the way for additional Japanese and Korean forces to thrust into mainland China. Within two weeks of the initial invasion Japanese and Korean ground forces had advanced fifty miles into mainland Chinese territory and seized Hainan Island, and after a month of gallant but unavailing struggle by Chiang’s armies the invasion force was on a steady march towards the Manchurian industrial city of Harbin.

The invasion of China was the death blow to relations between the Kagamoto regime and the United States; though continuing the same isolationist policies that had marked Calvin Coolidge’s tenure in the White House, President Herbert Hoover agreed with political leaders on both sides of the aisle in Washington that the U.S. could no longer afford to be seen doing business with the dictatorship in Tokyo, and on October 5th signed an executive order recalling all remaining U.S. diplomats from Japan and expelling and Japanese diplomatic personnel from the United States. The official state press agency Nippon Central Patriotic News denounced Hoover’s decision as “blatant warmongering”, an accusation which sounded remarkably cynical coming from a regime that had started an unprovoked war of aggression against a neighboring country.

On November 12th, 1930 Japanese and Korean troops surrounded the city of Shenyang, trapping two of the Chinese army’s best divisions in a steadily squeezing pincer move. Within three days one of the Chinese divisions had been annihilated and the other reduced to a handful of exhausted, hungry platoons who stood little chance of holding out in the face of determined action by the well-fed and well-equipped enemy besieging them from all sides. On November 17th, what was left of those platoons surrendered to the Japanese People’s Army. By the second week of December JPA advance battalions were less than fifteen miles from the outskirts of Nanking and the question seemed to be less if Chiang Kai-Shek’s government would collapse than when and where Japan would apply the pressure needed to make that collapse happen. The prevailing consensus in most world capitals was that the Republic of China was on its last legs...

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....but just when things seemed at their bleakest for the Chinese cause the JPA abruptly found itself meeting both stiffening resistance from the regular army and guerrilla raids from hastily organized partisan groups determined to push the Japanese People’s Army out of China at any cost. The previously swift Japanese advance slowed to crawl, and by February of 1931 Japanese and Korean troops were still stuck ten miles away from the Chinese capital. This was a situation Kagamoto couldn’t tolerate, and accordingly he gave Hideki Tojo his blessing to have the People’s Air Force mount terror bombings against Nanking and the venerable commercial hub of Shanghai in the hope such bombings might break the Chinese people’s will to continue their resistance against the Japanese-Korean invasion force. China’s air defense squadrons at the time were dangerously weak, thus making Nanking and Shanghai easy targets for the Japanese bombers.

It was dawn on March 10th, 1931 when the first wave of Japanese bombers took off from airfields in the Japanese-occupied sections of southern China to hit their assigned targets. While the bombers were expected to meet little in the way of fighter opposition, they still went accompanied by a substantial fighter escort; one Swiss reporter who was in Nanking when the bombers struck would later recollect that the fighters seemed to blanket the sky(in his words) “like a swarm of angry locusts”. A BBC Radio correspondent who was in Shanghai at the time that city came under attack would have a similar memory, saying the Japanese fighters resembled hornets buzzing forth from their nest.

The sun had just cleared the horizon when the first bombs exploded in the streets of Nanking. One of those explosions would have severe repercussions for what was left of Japanese diplomatic relations with Russia; a bomb struck the third floor of the Russian embassy, killing most of the ambassador’s staff and severely injuring the ambassador himself. Intelligence data gathered by agents of Russia’s Department of External Security(the country’s main counterintelligence bureau at the time) indicated the embassy had been intentionally targeted by the bombers, prompting an outraged Alexander Kerensky to sever formal ties between Moscow and Tokyo.

Chinese army anti-aircraft gunners did their best to try to repel the attack, but the Japanese bombers were too high up in the air for the guns to have much effect on them. Furthermore, the thick clouds of smoke resulting from the fires burning after the first wave of bombers hit Nanking made it extremely difficult for the AA gunners to even get a bead on the Japanese planes. And things weren’t much better over in Shanghai...

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....in some parts of that ancient metropolis, in fact, they were considerably worse. The Japanese bomber force sent to attack Shanghai was every bit as ruthless in striking their designated targets as the squadrons deployed against Nanking were in hitting theirs. Worst-hit of all parts of Shanghai was the city’s international district, where scores of fires were touched off by Japanese bombs; one in every three Western commercial and diplomatic buildings in the district burned to the ground as a result of these fires.

By noontime, when the final wave of Japanese bombers was turning for home, half of Nanking and three-quarters of Shanghai lay in ruins and the roadways leading out of those cities were jammed with refugees desperately trying to escape from the danger of another air raid-- or worse, a full-fledged ground offensive by the ruthless and fanatical Japanese People’s Army. The refugees were right to be alarmed: at 4:00 PM on the afternoon of March 10th JPA infantry and armor units launched a three-pronged assault against Chinese army troops defending Nanking, and within twelve hours after that Japanese and Korean ground forces commenced a full-fledged drive to seize Shanghai.

To Kagamoto’s and Tojo’s dismay, their armies couldn’t succeed in capturing Chiang Kai-Shek or his cabinet before they fled Nanking; indeed, when Japanese and Korean advance forces entered the Chinese capital on March 13th their commanding generals were disappointed to learn all but one of the Chiang government’s highest-level officials, including Chiang himself, had escaped the city before the Japanese marched in. The lone member of Chiang’s cabinet to be taken alive, his justice minister, would commit suicide while in Japanese military custody.       Still, things were for the most part going well for Japan and Korea in their Chinese campaign. Chiang’s navy had effectively ceased to exist, his air force was on the ropes, and his army was just about completely on the defense as it retreated ever deeper into the Chinese hinterlands in a desperate attempt to buy time for Chiang to organize a counteroffensive. In the Japanese-occupied zone of China, which was growing larger by the day, former Chinese imperial heir apparent Henry Pu-yi was installed as head of a puppet regime which was to be fully subservient to the Liberation Society regime in Tokyo and its allies in Seoul.

Thousands of miles from the fighting in China a certain ex- corporal from Austria turned German political leader was following events in the region with keen interest. Adolf Hitler, head of the Nazi Party, was cut from a vastly different ideological cloth than Kagamoto but shared the Japanese dictator’s loathing for China’s northern neighbor Russia; after the outbreak of war between China and Japan it had occurred to Hitler that a Japanese attack against Russia’s Siberian territories might prove useful in distracting the Kremlin from Hitler’s own grandiose plans for one day expropriating vast tracts of land in Russia’s European territories to satisfy his visions of Lebensraum(“living space”) for the German people. Seven years after Japan and Korea invaded the Chinese mainland, Hitler’s admiration of the ruthless way the Liberation Society regime dealt with China would set the stage for a diplomatic move which stunned the entire world....

To Be Continued