Summary: In the previous eight chapters of this series we remembered Japan’s 1916 April Revolution and the new government’s post-revolution crackdown on religious and political dissenters; the brief but intense 1932 Siberian border war with Russia in 1932; the Liberation Society- sponsored 1933 Singapore terror bombing; the 1934 succession of Yuji Kagamoto’s protégé, Mitsuharu Yamagida, to the chancellorship of the Japanese People’s Republic; the Ribbentrop-Matsuoka summit which led led to a formal political/military alliance between Nazi Germany and Japan in 1936; and the expansion of the Japanese People’s Navy carrier fleet during the late 1930s. In this segment we’ll review how the Nazi invasion of Poland of 1939 inspired the Yamagida regime to step up its own wars of aggression.

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Having established diplomatic ties with one fascist state, Adolf Hitler’s Germany, Japan’s Yamagida government now set to work mending relations with another fascist state, Benito Mussolini’s Italy. After the Duce severed diplomatic links with Tokyo to protest the Japanese- Korean alliance’s massacre of Chinese civilians in retaliation for the 1931 Shanghai suicide bombing of a Japanese military liaison office, a consensus had emerged in most world capitals that Italy and Japan were destined to remain estranged as long as Mussolini headed the Italian government. But with Italy’s relations with the Western powers growing more strained since her invasion of Ethiopia and Hitler relentlessly touting to his brother dictator the potential strategic benefits of a German-Italian Japanese alliance, Mussolini concluded that perhaps the time had come for a reconciliation between Rome and Tokyo.

That was music to Mitsuharu Yamagida’s ears. Despite the leftist ideology officially espoused by the Liberation Society, the Japanese chancellor had long been a deep admirer of the Italian fascist ruler’s skillful employment of stagecraft in the political arena and his deep understanding of the appeal of nationalism to the masses. Even after Italy broke off ties with Japan Yamagida had sought to keep the lines of communication with Mussolini open via the Japanese interests office of the German embassy in Rome, perceiving that one day Mussolini might have a change of heart about the Japanese People’s Republic and resume normal diplomatic relations with Tokyo.

So when German foreign minister Joachim von Ribbentrop visited Tokyo in May of 1937 and met with his Japanese counterpart Daisuke Matsuoka to propose a summit between Yamagida and Mussolini for the purpose of negotiating a resumption of official ties between Rome and Tokyo, Yamagida was quick to embrace the idea. Only three months after Ribbentrop’s Tokyo visit, Matsuoka was in Geneva for a conference with Italian foreign minister Galeazzo Ciano to lay the foundations for the first face-to-face meeting between Mussolini and Yamagida. Less than a month after that Yamagida was being given a grandiose welcome to Rome with all the pomp and pageantry which the Fascist regime could muster; the Duce and the Japanese chancellor spent four days engaged in talks about re-establishing formal ties between their respective countries. King Victor Emmanuel III was skeptical of Mussolini’s efforts to court the Liberation Society leader but swallowed his reservations for the sake of preserving the Italian throne, and on September 16th, 1937 the Japanese embassy in Berlin issued an announcement that Italy and Japan had agreed to resume normal diplomatic relations.

That announcement sent shock waves throughout the rest of the world. For years the idea of a Rome-Berlin-Tokyo alliance had been considered at best a propaganda pipe dream; after the original break in ties between Italy and Japan in 1931 Western intelligence experts had come to take it as a given that such a coalition would never be established. Even the opening of diplomatic relations between Hitler’s Germany and the Japanese People’s Republic hadn’t been enough to make anyone in 10 Downing Street, the White House, the Quai d’Orsay or the Kremlin reconsider their views on this point. But now the experts had been proven starkly and frighteningly wrong-- left-leaning Japan was allied to not one but two fascist regimes in Europe, and the world had become more dangerous than ever.

And still worse shocks were to come. In April of 1938 Spanish Falangist guerrilla leader Francisco Franco accepted a Japanese offer of military and financial support in return for Franco’s guarantee of friendship with Japan once he’d seized power; that same month German Kriegsmarine admiral Karl Doenitz secured permission from the People’s Navy for maritime armaments factories in Germany to begin building a German version of the People’s Navy’s newest torpedo, the Long Lance, for service with the Kriegsmarine’s U-boat fleet. By the time German occupation troops marched into Czechoslovakia’s Sudetenland region six months later Japan had started relations with the Antonescu regime in Romania and Belgian fascist agitator Leon Degrelle was making regular visits to the Japanese embassy in Brussels. Degrelle’s fellow fascist, Dutch NSB party founder Anton Mussert, arranged for two dozen of his party’s top officials to take classes in practical Japanese as a first step towards preparing them for possible future positions as envoys to Tokyo if and when the NSB ever came to power in the Netherlands.

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It was around mid-afternoon on September 1st, 1939 when the chief receptionist at the Japanese embassy in Berlin received a phone call from the German foreign ministry announcing that the Führer would soon be speaking to the Reichstag regarding Germany’s border dispute with Poland. The call was duly passed on to the Japanese ambassador, who in turn telegraphed word of the impending speech to Tokyo. The speech, as it turned out, was a declaration of war by Nazi Germany against Poland in retaliation for the Polish government’s repeated refusal to let the Nazis create a corridor across Polish territory to the city of Danzig. It had an electric effect on Hitler’s fellow Nazis-- and on Mitsuharu Yamagida, who saw the German blitzkrieg in Poland as a possible future model for his own armies’ combat operations in China and elsewhere. No sooner had Hitler concluded his speech declaring war on the Poles than a delegation of Japanese military observers was en route to the Polish front to look at how the Wehrmacht and the Luftwaffe coordinated their attacks to quickly rout the Polish army before it was able to organize even a token counteroffensive.

Chancellor Yamagida read the observer delegation’s reports with the fascination of a schoolboy poring over an illicitly obtained XXX- rated magazine. Even the Japanese People’s Army’s boldest strategic moves to date during the war in China paled by comparison to what the Germans were doing in Poland; the success of the Wehrmacht’s armored divisions against the ill-equipped Polish cavalry made a particularly strong impression on the Japanese dictator. He convened a late night meeting of the Japanese People’s Army general staff on September 15th and ordered them to immediately draft battle plans for a blitzkrieg- style campaign against the battered but still-resisting partisans in eastern China and the Western military bases dotting the Pacific. “He was absolutely obsessed with what the Germans were doing in Poland.” a former Japanese People’s Army adjutant to Yamagida would recall in a 1965 Time magazine interview. “It was the first thing he talked of every morning and the last thing on his mind at night....He wanted to use blitzkrieg warfare to crush the Chinese once and for all.”

He wasn’t the only one to be so enthralled by the German army’s spectacular successes in the Polish campaign; war minister Hideki Tojo made daily phone calls to the Japanese military attaché in Berlin to request updates on how far the Wehrmacht had progressed in its drive toward the Polish capital, Warsaw. In October of 1939, when Ribbentrop made a return visit to Tokyo to take part in the signing of a German- Japanese trade pact, Tojo was one of the first officials in Yamagida’s cabinet to meet with the German foreign minister and the two men spent most of their time together discussing the Polish campaign.

Two months after Ribbentrop’s latest trip to Japan, the Yamagida regime was ready to take its first crack at mounting a blitzkrieg-type offensive in China. In what was officially designated Operation Steel Thunder by the JPA and known in the West as “the Christmas offensive”, JPA infantry, tanks, and artillery backed by People’s Air Force dive bomber squadrons struck at the Chinese in a four-pronged assault timed to catch the armies of Chiang Kai-Shek and Mao Zedong at their lowest state of alertness. In the beginning the Christmas offensive appeared to be succeeding as brilliantly as the German campaign that had first inspired it-- a senior Russian military intelligence official went so far as to tell new Russian prime minister Maxim Livitnov the Chinese government might collapse by New Year’s Day the way things were going.

But as had been the case more than once in the past since China and Japan first went to war, the determination of the Chinese people to rid their country of the Japanese-Korean alliance’s occupation army reasserted itself with a vengeance. A renewed wave of guerrilla raids by Mao Zedong’s partisans and a two-pronged counterattack by regular Chinese army troops left the Japanese People’s Army stopped right in its tracks in Manchuria and along a 40-mile front in the eastern part of the Chinese mainland. By May of 1940, while Yamagida’s Nazi allies were steamrollering the Belgian, Dutch, and French armies in Europe, Operation Steel Thunder had ground to a halt and Yamagida was seething with frustration that China hadn’t thrown in the towel.

That frustration, combined with the knowledge that the United States, Russia, and Great Britain all had staunchly pro-China foreign policies, would lead him to make a series of decisions that would turn out to have dire consequences for his military, his country, and last but not least for his government. One of the first of those decisions was to give the People’s Navy the green light to ratchet up its plans for attacking U.S. naval and military installations in the Far East...

To Be Continued