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Seizing The Telegraph Office: Japan’s 1916 April Revolution And Its Consequences

(based on the “The Times That Try Men’s Souls” series from the same author)

 

Part 5 By Chris Oakley

Summary: In the previous four chapters of this series we recalled Japan’s April Revolution of 1916 and the massacre of the Japanese imperial family; the new regime’s barbaric crackdown on religious and political dissenters in the early post-revolutionary era; and the and the rise in tensions between Japan the outbreak of the Sino- Japanese War in late 1930. In this chapter we’ll look back at the Damansky Island border incident of 1932 and the tragic December 7th bombing in Singapore a year later.

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The few Chinese civilians still in Nanking when Japanese and Korean troops entered the city were fearful that they would be subjected to manner of atrocities by their conquerors. They were quite right to be concerned: since the original invasion of the Chinese mainland back in October of 1930, the Japanese People’s Army and their brethren in the Korean National Popular Army(KNPA) had committed scores of atrocities against Chinese civilians. And they would perpetrate even more hideous carnage when they entered Nanking proper; a Swedish newspaper reporter who had disregarded his own safety in order to keep an accurate record of the Chinese capital’s fall personally witnessed JPA troops set fire to an elementary school with most of its students and teachers trapped inside. This was just one example of the JPA’s savagery in Nanking; in just four short days following the Chinese capital’s fall, hundreds of thousands of Chinese civilians would be massacred by the Japanese.

Until the advent of the Holocaust, the Japanese depredations at Nanking would be regarded as the worst mass murders in human history. After the Liberation Society’s regime collapsed in the 1990s, Japan’s newly established democratic government would institute a reparations fund for the families of the massacre victims and launch a full scale inquiry into the atrocities. At the time, however, the Kagamoto regime defended the massacres as “a necessary punitive measure” to thwart any attempts at an uprising by Nanking’s citizens against JPA occupation forces and said it was ready to take similar action in other cities in Japanese-occupied China in order to guarantee the national security of the People’s Republic against possible future threats from the Chinese mainland.

Having thoroughly slaughtered the overwhelming majority of the civilian population of Nanking and cut down its army garrison to the last man, the Japanese occupation forces now went to work creating a suitably subservient puppet regime to rule the Chinese territories the JPA had conquered since the invasion of 1930. They found their man in Henry Pu Yi, the so-called “Last Emperor Of China” who had abdicated his throne following the Chinese Republican revolution of 1912 and was living under Japanese protection in Tianjin at the time Nanking was taken. Disappointed by the collapse of the Imperial system under which his family’s dynasty had ruled China for centuries and the subsequent failure of his own attempt to restore that dynasty in 1917, Pu Yu was a highly willing collaborator in the Kagamoto regime’s plans to create a puppet regime for the Japanese-occupied sectors of China and quickly accepted a place in the puppet government as prime minister for what Tokyo laughingly dubbed the Sovereign Democratic Republic of China and Manchukuo.

The new Chinese puppet state was shunned like a leper by the rest of the world community-- and by the majority of Chinese citizens for that matter. Those living outside the Japanese occupation zone still backed Chiang’s Republican government or else fought in the guerrilla armies of onetime Liberation Society advocate-turned-archnemesis Mao Zedong. Mao had originally been a staunch and highly vocal supporter of the Society’s ideology but become disillusioned with the Kagamoto regime as the extent of its animosity toward his people became clear; when he learned about the atrocities JPA soldiers and their Korean allies had perpetrated against Chinese civilians, his disillusionment transformed into full-blown hatred for Japan. That hate in turn became a steel-edged determination to drive the Japanese occupation forces and their Korean allies out of mainland China at any cost; in one of the most surprising about-faces in Chinese political history, Mao put aside his long-running animosities toward political archrival Chiang Kai-Shek and entered into an awkward partnership with the Nationalist leader to wage what in modern military terms is known as “asymmetrical warfare” against the JPA.

Mao’s guerrilla war against the Japanese occupation forces began in June of 1931 with an ambush of a JPA patrol east of Nanking. Eleven Japanese soldiers and two Korean intelligence operatives accompanying the patrol to assist with prisoner interrogations were killed during the ambush, and two other Japanese troops would die from their wounds within hours after the attack ended; in a fit of rage, the local JPA commandant ordered that hundreds of Chinese civilians be arrested at random and executed. These executions accomplished little other than to further cement anti-Japanese sentiment among the Chinese people and provoke the guerrillas to escalate their attacks on Japanese soldiers. And it wasn’t just Japanese military installations that were targeted by the insurgents-- Korean bases also came under attack, often as not in tandem with raids on Japanese outposts.

Perhaps the most famous partisan operation against a Korean military facility in the early months of the guerrilla war was the September 1931 suicide bombing of the Korean National Popular Army’s liaison offices at the JPA’s southern China regional command staff headquarters in Shanghai. 37 KNPA soldiers and officers and a dozen Japanese soldiers were killed in the bombing. In retaliation for this attack KNPA troops marched on the bomber’s home village and razed it in an orgy of destruction and murder which rivaled any war crime the Japanese People’s Army had committed up until then; Adolf Hitler, in a conversation with Joseph Goebbels shortly after the Nazis assumed power in Germany, would comment admiringly about the ruthlessness the KNPA troops had shown in destroying the village. Later he would urge his SS chief, Heinrich Himmler, to use the incident as a template for the Nazis’ own “Final Solution” campaign to annihilate Europe’s Jewish population.

Other world leaders blasted the massacre as a prime example of the Japanese-Korean occupation forces’ brutality. Alexander Kerensky, then in the midst of his second term as Russia’s prime minister, took to the floor of the Duma to denounce Kagamoto and his Korean ally, Kim Dae Jun, as “thugs of the worst order” and “accomplices of Satan”; in London British prime minister Ramsay MacDonald went before the House of Commons to condemn the massacre as “an act of barbarism that makes the blood boil and the heart shudder”. President of the United States Herbert Hoover delivered a radio address from the Oval Office blasting the massacre as “the most hideous atrocity one nation has perpetrated against another in the annals of modern war”. Benito Mussolini reacted to the massacre by breaking off diplomatic relations between Italy and Japan (an ironic decision in retrospect, considering what Mussolini’s own armies would later do in Ethiopia).

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When Alexander Kerensky first became prime minister of Russia, one of his top foreign policy priorities was to settle a long-standing border dispute with China regarding the territory of Damansky Island. To that end, he negotiated a pact with the Chiang Kai-Shek government in 1928 which enabled the Russians to retain political jurisdiction over Damansky in exchange for financial compensation to the Chinese government and a guarantee of the right of Chinese nationals to enter or leave the Damansky territory without unnecessary restrictions. When the Japanese People’s Army invaded mainland China two years later the Russian Federal Army general staff in Moscow, quickly recognizing the potential danger to Russia’s border security should Japanese military forces advance to within striking distance of the island, dispatched a number of their best Siberian divisions to the Damansky region as a warning to Tokyo that it could expect to meet dogged resistance should it try to take the island by force.

Those Siberian divisions arrived just in the nick of time; by the end of 1931 Japanese ground forces had managed to advance close enough to the Russian frontier that an observer standing on the Russian side of the borderline could read the license plates on Japanese army troop trucks with the unaided eye. The Kagamoto regime made it clear that in their eyes Kerensky’s treaty with Chiang Kai-Shek regarding the island was nothing more than a nuisance to be pushed aside anytime that Tokyo pleased. Naturally this attitude didn’t set well with Kerensky or with his cabinet-- and they showed their displeasure by expanding the total number of combat aircraft stationed in Siberia.

During the spring of 1932 tensions along the border of the island region continued to mount. Russian Federal Army soldiers warily eyed their JPA counterparts through telescopes and binoculars; rarely did a day go by when Federal Strategic Air Forces fighter squadrons didn’t have to scramble at least once-- and often more than once --in order to intercept Japanese People’s Air Corps reconnaissance planes sent to photograph Russian ground forces activity on the northern side of the frontier. A British newspaper correspondent familiar with the state of affairs in the area wrote to his readers back in London that Damansky Island might well prove “the flashpoint for a second World War”.

Those tensions finally hit the boiling point on June 7th, 1932 when a Russian Federal Army detachment on routine patrol near the east part of the island spotted a party of Japanese soldiers conducting what the Russians suspected was an attempt to breach their border as a test of the Federal Army’s defenses in the region. The Russian patrol quickly confronted the Japanese troops, and a brief but vicious skirmish took place which left three men dead and two others wounded on the Russian side; Japanese losses totaled at two dead and three wounded. When news of the incursion got back to Kerensky that evening, he was livid; one of his senior cabinet aides would later recall that the prime minister seemed like “a man driven to frenzy” by his rage at the JPA’s actions at Damansky.

In a speech before the Duma on June 8th, Kerensky denounced the JPA sortie as “unmitigated aggression” against the Russian Federation and pledged that any further such incursions would be regarded as acts of war by Japan on Russia. Unimpressed, the Japanese answered Kerensky’s threat by making a second incursion into the island region just after dawn on June 10th, this time with artillery fire backing up the ground troops. That second infiltration proved to be Tokyo’s crucial mistake: by noon on June 11th, the Duma had passed a declaration of war against the Japanese People’s Republic and infantry and armored divisions were lining up along Russia’s Siberian border to engage the JPA on a larger scale.

It was in the three-week Siberian frontier conflict that the JPA finally experienced its first significant strategic defeat. Expecting to run roughshod over the Russians as easily as they had been doing to date against the Chinese regular army, the Japanese ground forces were instead confronted by a determined, highly motivated foe equipped with some of the most modern weaponry available to any standing army of the time. Russia not only had substantial weapons manufacturing industries in its own right but also maintained licensing agreements with British and French arms companies as well as the Swedish munitions corporation Bofors. And even the isolationist views of the Hoover Administration didn’t stop U.S. automotive giants like Ford and Chrysler from selling trucks to the Kerensky government for use as transports by the Federal Army(indeed, it became a popular joke about Russian troops that “the two greatest military leaders in Russian history are Marshal Suvorov and General Ford”).

As for the Russian air force’s Siberian squadrons, they gave the Japanese People’s Air Corps its first real opposition in any of the military campaigns the People’s Republic had waged up until that time. The first time Russian and Japanese fighters met in combat, the Russian pilots shot down their Japanese adversaries at a ratio of four planes to one; before the Siberian war was over that ratio would climb to six to one. These losses would prove a shock to the system for the Air Corps general staff back in Tokyo and prompt a drastic overhaul of tactics and equipment after the war ended.

Perhaps the worst defeat the Japanese suffered at the Russians’ hands during the Siberian border conflict came on June 27th, 1932, just over two weeks after hostilities began. Three Japanese divisions-- two infantry and one armored --were attempting to cross the border to take the town of Svobodnyy when five Russian divisions swept down from the northwest and cut off the Japanese rear flank. As the Japanese forces were attempting to break out of this encirclement, a corps of Russian marines attacked from the east and sliced one of the Japanese infantry divisions to pieces. It took the Russian defenders only eighteen hours to reduce the massive JPA invasion force to a handful of mentally and physically exhausted riflemen, and even less time after that for said handful to capitulate to Russian officers.

For the Kagamoto regime Svobodnyy represented a thumb in the eye of its ambitions to become the dominant power in Asia. Even the most fanatical ideologues in his cabinet realized Japan couldn’t keep pressing its claim to the Damansky Island territories at that point without running the risk of having the Siberian border conflict blow up into a full-fledged second Russo-Japanese war....or severely if not fatally disrupting the JPA’s timetable for completing the conquest of mainland China. So on July 3rd, 1932, Tokyo reluctantly agreed to sign an armistice with Moscow to avoid more bloodshed (and, more important from the JPA’s general staff perspective, the risk of Japanese troops suffering another decisive defeat at the Russian army’s hands).

There were few if any illusions in the international community that the armistice constituted anything remotely resembling a lasting peace or even a framework for it. But very shortly, the attention of both Japan and its overseas adversaries would turn towards an island possession of Britain on the Malaysian peninsula, where a barbaric act of state-sponsored terrorism would further exacerbate already severe animosities between Tokyo and the West....

******

At the time the Japanese and their Korean allies invaded mainland China Singapore had been a British possession since 1819, and was thought by many people both within and outside its borders to be invulnerable to attack. Rarely, if ever, did senior British army or naval commanders pass up the opportunity to issue statements boasting about the strength of the island’s defenses; they took an especially great pride in the shore batteries which dotted Singapore’s coastline. This notion of impregnability was bluff than reality, as it turned out-- a fact the People’s Committee for State Defense was more than happy to exploit when the opportunity arose to strike against the British Empire in a place where it thought itself safe.

In early 1933, as Adolf Hitler was coming to power in Germany and Franklin Delano Roosevelt was starting his first term as President of the United States, the People’s Committee for State Defense organized a plan to carry out a series of terror bomb attacks at British defense and commercial installations in Singapore. The PCSD had been operating a sleeper cell on the island since 1927, and it would now employ this cell to carry out most of the attacks. Most of the agents belonging to this cell were indigenous Malayans, but it also included a substantial number of Japanese nationals who lived in Singapore’s Japanese refugee community under assumed names in order to conceal their true political sympathies.

The terror bomb plot was planned and prepared for with a level of operational security the CIA would have envied. Using a simple, highly efficient code system, the members of the sleeper cell transmitted and received messages right under the noses of British colonial police. To further conceal their activities, the agents of the sleeper cell would base their primary bomb-making facility deep in the Malayan jungle as a means of preventing its exposure by British military or intelligence investigators.

In late November of 1933 PCSD headquarters in Tokyo gave the final go-ahead for the bombings to begin. The sleeper cell accordingly hastened its work in assembling the explosive devices which would be used in the bomb attacks; late on the evening of December 6th, the last bombs were put together and smuggled into Singapore proper under cover of darkness. At 6:00 AM local time on the morning of December 7th, the sleeper cell’s agents fanned out across the island colony to plant the bombs at their assigned targets.

The clock had just struck eight when the first bomb exploded, killing Singapore’s British governor-general and five of his six most senior deputies;British and Malayan colonial troops had barely left their barracks to respond to this atrocity when additional bombs went off simultaneously at the headquarters of the island’s Royal Navy and RAF garrisons. By 8:30 bombs had ravaged Singapore’s main British Army garrison, the offices of the island colony’s largest English-language newspaper, the popular tavern Robinson’s, and two of the island’s most critical rubber distribution facilities. Two more bombs detonated just before 9:30 AM, killing dozens of people at one of Singapore harbor’s largest docks.

The carnage would only get worse as the morning wore on; by the time British Army engineers found and disarmed the final bomb around 11:50 AM, more than seventy-five people lay dead and nearly two hundred others were injured as a result of the bomb blasts the Japanese sleeper cell had set off. An anonymous statement mailed to the new acting governor-general shortly after the bombings claimed the bomb attacks had been carried out “in the name of the oppressed peoples of Malaya” but no one in London, or Malaya for that matter, believed that for a minute. Even as the first funerals were being held for the victims of the December 7th bombings British political leaders were pointing an accusing finger in Tokyo’s direction and police and intelligence agents were sifting the wrecking for evidence that could definitively tie the Japanese People’s Republic to the attacks.

The already gaping chasm between Japan and the West was about to get even wider...


The main air defense branch of the Russian air force at the time of the Damansky Island incident

Quoted from the May 16th, 1932 edition of The Times.

 

 

 

 

To Be Continued

 

 

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