Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945

by Rana Mitter

But the Panay affair was a clear warning that the West could not rely on neutrality to shut itself off from the ever-spreading war.

Tang gave orders to his divisions to break through the CCAA’s siege via a gate in the city’s northern wall, and abandon Nanjing to the Japanese. Immediately, Chinese soldiers fled, looted, and squeezed through the wall, in some cases drowning in the Yangtze in their haste to escape. Some 70,000 had already been killed trying to defend the city. The night sky was lit up by flames; this was not the doing of the Japanese, but of the Chinese troops who had set further major buildings ablaze.

More and more people arrived at Ginling College: because Japanese soldiers were arriving in broad daylight to steal their money and to rape. In the streets, a lot of people have been bayoneted to death, even in the Safety Zone. Even more [have been killed] outside [the Zone]; nobody dares go outside. Most of the dead are young men.

Beiping and Tianjin had been occupied without major chaos. Even Shanghai, pounded to destruction that same autumn, had fallen into a deathly calm once the Nationalist government had retreated. But something utterly different happened in Nanjing. From the first hours of the occupation, the Japanese troops seem to have abandoned all constraints. For the next

six weeks, until the middle of January 1938, the soldiers of the Japanese Central China Area Army embarked on an uninterrupted spree of murder, rape, and robbery. Far from establishing a new, if temporary, order in the city, the army seemed determined to reduce Nanjing to utter chaos.

Cheng despaired of Vautrin’s desperate attempts to mediate by reporting these acts to the Japanese consulate: “I tell her, the more you report them, the more they will keep doing this.” Yet Cheng also noted that without the few Americans and Germans in the city assisting them, even more Chinese would be on “the road to death.”

Approximately 20,000 cases of rape occurred within the city during the first month of the occupation.50 The IMTFE also found that 20,000 Chinese civilian men were killed on the false grounds that they were ex-combatants, and that 30,000 genuine combatants were killed and their bodies thrown in the river.

This dispute should not obscure the fact that a very large number died as the out-of-control Imperial Army exacted revenge on a population that had stood in the way of its advance. The anarchy in Nanjing showed very clearly that there was a crippling division between the rhetoric (and possibly the intentions) of the Japanese civilians in the city and the behavior of the military. Over and over again, Japanese Embassy officials and senior officers declared that they would calm the situation down. But in the streets the rape and murder went on. Japan was at the time a very hierarchical society. Still,

over the previous two decades, it had become clear that lower-level actors in Japan were quite capable of defying their supposed superiors, and that as long as they acted quickly, those superiors would not question their acts, at least in public. The occupation of Manchuria in 1931 had not been approved by the government in Tokyo, but once it had happened, the government (led by a relative liberal) felt unable to condemn it.

Chiang Kai-shek felt similarly about the country as a whole. How could the population be persuaded to resist when nationalism was still patchy and unformed, and when everyday needs, such as food and shelter, were much more pressing? And who should be judged a collaborator, and on what grounds?

But in the end the focus must be on Japanese terror, not Chinese faults. Chinese missteps were the result of a war they had never sought. In contrast, the Japanese behavior was inexcusable. As Durdin pointed out, “The Japanese appear to want the horrors to remain as long as possible, to impress on the Chinese the terrible results of resisting Japan,” adding, “Nanking today is housing a terrorized population who, under alien domination, live in fear of death, torture, and robbery. The graveyard of tens of thousands of Chinese soldiers may also be the graveyard of all Chinese hopes of resisting conquest by Japan.”

Japanese during their invasion of eastern China. The Japanese Army was deeply angry. It had assumed that it would conquer China fast, and that the lack of resistance that it had met on earlier incursions between 1931 and 1937 would be repeated. The strength of opposition, and the length of time it took to secure Shanghai, had enraged troops who were already whipped up by propaganda about the rightness of their cause, and who had themselves been brutalized by their military training in Japan.

Even if there was no meticulous plan for the massacre in Nanjing, the wider ideological clash between Japan and China was a central cause of the tragedy. Japanese Pan-Asianism had metamorphosed in the decades between 1900 and the 1930s, and the Japanese were seized with a sincere, if deluded, belief that they had a duty to lead their Asian neighbors, including China, in a journey of liberation from Western imperialism. The notion that China might have developed its own vision of nationalism, in which Japan was as much an aggressor as the West, did not fit into the worldview of the invaders. This cognitive dissonance did a great deal to fuel the contempt of the troops for their victims and their consequent savagery.

THE THREE YEARS BETWEEN the fall of Wuhan in late 1938 and Pearl Harbor at the end of 1941 may at first glance give the appearance of a stalemate in the history of the Sino-Japanese War. It is true that the three major parties settled in for a long war, a strategy acknowledged by both Chiang and Mao. But there was nothing calm or stable about China’s situation during those three years. For a start, China had to fight practically alone without any assurance that help from the outside world would be forthcoming. It took massive military commitments on all sides to maintain a division

of China among the Nationalists in the south and center, the Communists in the north, and the Japanese in the east. The nature of the war changed from offensive to defensive. The dramatic battles of the first year of the war were fewer in number: instead, China’s fate became tied up with shifting alliances, diplomatic intrigues, and social change that would permanently alter the country’s course. Central to those changes were new ideas of social provision. Traditionally, the Chinese state had taken little responsibility for the direct day-to-day welfare of its inhabitants. Now, the circumstances of war forced the new regimes into competition with each other. Nationalists and Communists would strive to demonstrate that as the state demanded more of its people, so they should demand more of their government. Meanwhile, the regimes under Japanese occupation would show that the new masters would have to confront many of the same old problems.

Such hastily built dwellings were hardly a surprise in a desperately poor city suddenly thrust into national and international prominence. Chongqing’s population had soared as refugees poured into Free China: a city of nearly 474,000 people in 1937 had expanded to over 700,000 by 1941 and would rise to some 1.05 million by the end of the war.7 Sichuan province served as a major base for the government’s plans for resistance and reconstruction, and its population (at its highest point in 1944) was some 47.5 million people.

Because of its mountain topography, Chongqing is enveloped in fog for most of the autumn and winter, a deterrent for any enemy aircraft seeking to raid the capital. The

lack of reliable power supplies also meant that there were few bright lights to attract the attention of visitors from above. But spring brought with it warmer weather and an end to the protective mist. The city then became a clear target. Many aspects of life in the city were beyond the Nationalist government’s control, and none more so than the terrifying new reality of constant bombings. In the winter of 1938 there were a few “trial raids” on the city. The attacks began in earnest from the spring of 1939, and it was the destruction that rained down on May 3 and 4 that year that really marked the arrival of a new campaign of terror. Yet the “great raids” (da hongzha) that had so cruelly marked the twentieth anniversary of the nationalist May Fourth demonstrations were just the start of a stream of destruction from the sky that would be part of everyday existence for years to come.

Chongqing’s air-raid defenses remained weak, largely because the alternative would have required a swift increase in China’s aerial warfare capacity, as well as antiaircraft weapons and other equipment that the country simply did not possess. Chiang’s wife Song Meiling addressed the problem in 1937 by recruiting one of the more remarkable

figures to work in wartime China: retired US Air Force Major General Claire Lee Chennault. A strong advocate of airpower, Chennault took over the training of China’s still minimal air force (the official number of 600 aircraft was probably an exaggeration). As well as giving combat training to the small cadre of Chinese pilots, Chennault also recruited pilots from the US who might be better able to take on Japanese fighters. The group was officially known as the American Volunteer Group (AVG), but it soon became much better known by its nickname, the “Flying Tigers.” The group was a real morale-booster for the beleaguered capital, even though the Tigers never actually flew in combat over its skies. But the real significance of Chennault’s presence and views would not be made clear for several more years.

The government knew that its treatment of refugees was being judged in comparison with the Communists and with the Japanese. For many in the middle class, particularly those of a progressive frame of mind, the clear alternative was the Communists. The refugees from poorer rural backgrounds were more inclined to consider living under Japanese occupation. To do so would mean at least enjoying the familiarity of home, and in some cases the Japanese may have seemed no worse—or even better—than the many militarists who had rampaged through China in previous decades. The Nationalist government was therefore reluctant to let refugees return home, not only for reasons of national pride, but also because the returnees might prove an excellent source of intelligence about conditions in Free China. The Japanese in turn made sure to offer incentives to return. One report from 1940 declared that refugees were being tempted by rumors of a bumper harvest in the occupied zone, and were being assisted

by road maps and instructions being smuggled to them by agents of the Japanese, with very specific advice on where to obtain free vehicle rides, or how to find smugglers’ boats to make the tricky journey downriver from Yichang to Wuhan. “If we do not root this out,” noted one concerned government report, “this will have a grave effect on the War of Resistance.” In response, the Nationalists put more resources into propaganda as well as relief efforts, trying to prevent the newcomers from being “deceived by the enemy.”

Recruitment was key to the government’s efforts to continue resistance. But initially conscription had been haphazard, and little had been done to explain to the wider population the significance of their participation in the war. As a result, there had been widespread desertion, as well as corruption by local officials who accepted government recruitment fees but then failed to sign up the troops as promised. In January 1938 new regulations were introduced that tried to regularize recruitment, which set monthly recruitment targets and (at least on paper) forbade forced enlistment. While recruitment was never popular, and continued to be plagued by endless numbers of

abuses at the local level, in the first few years of the war it managed to hold steady (total recruitment to the Nationalist armies remained broadly steady at between 1.7 million and 2 million men a year between 1938 and 1941). In the initial years of the war, the system did not engender widespread, endemic social unrest.25 Another report attacked the failure to enthuse a huge section of the population: rural women. “Women are conservative, and their outlooks are rooted in clan and countryside,” it declared. “They don’t understand the meaning of the War of Resistance.” The writer believed that the war provided an opportunity to mobilize women and increase their national consciousness, making use of the fact that the Japanese had “kidnapped children, burned property, and raped women.” The role that was envisaged for women was not necessarily a liberating one—nursing wounded soldiers or making clothes for the troops—but the report acknowledged that women needed to be included in any modernization of society. War was supposed to create a nation-state from all of China’s citizens.

The Nationalist wartime economy did show promise. Prior to the outbreak of war, China had not been self-sufficient in food, and had regularly imported millions of tons of grain and rice, largely from Southeast Asia. During the first years of the war, rice imports were increased, the purchase price of rice in major cities in Free China remained broadly stable, and farmers were reasonably prosperous. Luck played some part in this; for the first two years of the war, fine weather meant plentiful harvests. However, the government also instituted reforms that contributed to productivity, including the use of refugee labor, the application of modern pesticides, and the supply of loans for agricultural collectives. The result was relative stability in food supply: up to 1940, crops of rice and wheat, as well as many other major crops, remained constant.27 Still, the Nationalists’ efforts to create a state with welfare responsibilities while fighting a war were expensive, and Chiang’s government was cash-strapped. Between 1937 and 1939 annual government revenues fell by 63 percent, whereas expenditure increased by 33 percent. Many of the major sources of state revenue, most notably import duties collected by the Chinese Maritime Customs, were lost when the National

Government retreated from the east of the country. Instead, a new interport duty was established that taxed the movement of goods within China. Although a barrier to the free market, it proved a reasonably effective means of replacing a small proportion of the lost Customs revenue in the first two years of the war.28 The industrial economy of Nationalist China was also in a worrying state. Beginning in 1932, the government had concentrated on creating a “defense state,” involving central government control of new military-oriented enterprises such as steel production and the manufacture of machinery. However, the new industries had not yet been fully constructed when war broke out, and most of the factories that were transferred upriver to Sichuan were privately owned. The region had just 4 percent of China’s total electrical power-generation capacity; it held a similar tiny percentage of China’s industrial capital. Sichuan lacked the railways, modern steel production, and highways developed elsewhere in the country in the decade before the war broke out.29 This was therefore a pitifully small base on which to try to mobilize a wartime industrial economy. To make matters worse, the loss of eastern China meant that the best way that

further industrial materials could be brought to Sichuan was to bring them in by sea from the south, or else to fly them in via the dangerous route over the Burma “Hump” from India to China. The alternatives to imports included ingenious but increasingly desperate meas...

The Japanese were almost as unprepared for the responsibilities of occupation as the Nationalists were for governing in retreat. The invaders had not expected the events of July 1937 to turn into an all-out war, and they had few concrete plans in place to deal with the extent of their sudden new conquests. There were precedents, however. In particular, the occupation of Manchuria in 1931–1932 had forced the Japanese to find ways to deal with the politics and economics of occupation. Their general technique had been to find collaborators, preferably people of some standing, to run local government for them. The Japanese wanted their conquests to pay for themselves, or

better still, to provide revenue for Japan, but realized that in the short term they would have to spend money to restore order and gain the trust of the local population. These techniques had been easier to carry out in Manchuria, where there was little serious military resistance to occupation, in comparison to central China in 1937–1938, where the fighting had devastated the local infrastructure. Bringing order back was the best chance for the Japanese to claim legitimacy for their new regime.

the withdrawal of the National

Government from eastern China cleared the path for banditry. As the war went on, the Japanese and local authorities would blur the issue by using the term “bandit” to refer to groups ranging from criminals simply out for ransom to anti-Japanese partisans.

When they wrote their memoirs, the outsiders who visited the Communist capital at Yan’an in Shaanxi province came back, over and over again, to the subject of food. Mealtimes were at 8:00 a.m., 11:00 a.m., and 3:00 p.m., and consisted of millet porridge or dried millet as a staple. In winter, there were no eggs, as it was too cold for the chickens to lay.45 Food was rationed carefully and there was little variation, although mothers with children were given extra meat. The privilege system by which certain people in high standing with the party got better provisions meant that there could be discrimination within families: the writer Ai Qing got the medium-quality meal, whereas his wife and child obtained only basic-level food.46 The meal regime was one facet of a larger way of life. Wartime Yan’an was stark and regimented, particularly for those who had accepted the discipline of the party. Even more than in Chongqing, Yan’an was the testing ground for a new social contract. The party and state promised deeper commitments to social provision, but demanded complete obedience in return.

Mao saw the fall of these cities as a sign that the positional warfare of the large Nationalist armies was over, and that guerrilla warfare would be the dominant strategic method, at least until the war became internationalized. As with Chiang’s plans, this was a leap of faith, for there was no indication in autumn 1937 that the war was likely to become global.

The powerful status of Yan’an as a beacon of radical resistance attracted large numbers of migrants, some 100,000 between 1937 and 1940.52 These numbers were dwarfed by the millions who fled to Chongqing, but the types of people who came to Yan’an were disproportionately well educated: perhaps some 50,000 were middle-class, educated types such as students, journalists, and teachers. Many of them came in search of a new future for China, feeling that the Nationalists were already hopelessly compromised by the brutality of their government’s behavior before 1937. For many, however, the reality of Yan’an did not measure up to the dream. The small city was in an economically deprived and backward area that made Chongqing look like a sophisticated metropolis. The surrounding areas of Shaanxi province were desperately poor—one reason the Communist message had resonated there—and still almost entirely agricultural. The total population of the region that the party ruled from Yan’an was only 1.4 million. The region was prone to natural disasters (earthquakes and drought) along with human-made ones (banditry and famine).53 The harsh yellow loess soil had formed into cliffs into which cave houses were carved.

The initial years of the war saw significant expansion of the Communist Party and its allied forces. Between 1937 and 1941 the number of members rose from some 40,000 to 763,447, and from a total force of some 92,000 at the start, the combined Eighth Route Army and New Fourth Army rose to some 440,000 troops over the same period.68 Within the Communist base areas, there were also local militias, many of

whose recruits divided their time between normal agricultural activity and military service, reducing the fear (prevalent in the Nationalist areas) of young men being recruited to the army and leaving the family without a breadwinner. Rather than the Nationalist policy of trying (not always successfully) to redistribute grain to military families, the Communists sought to lessen the distance between military service and everyday rural life. In addition, until 1940, the Nationalists subsidized the economy of SGN with an injection of some C$600,000 (then US$180,000) per month, providing valuable income for a desperately impoverished region. (Following the termination of Nationalist financial support, Stalin authorized a payment in 1940 to the CCP of some US$300,000.)

The Communists also sponsored wider participation in local assemblies while ensuring that the party made the real decisions. To criticize these systems (as observers did) as empty and lacking in real political power misses some of the point. They were not designed to measure up against pluralist models of liberal democracy, but rather against premodern systems in which imperial subjects had no inherent citizen rights to participation in government at all. Yet these ideological systems were also a sign of how reluctant the dominant parties were to share real power.

In September 1939 the Japanese Imperial Army, its operations now unified under the China Expeditionary Command, had sent 100,000 troops to take the central Chinese city of Changsha, which had already suffered grievously after the retreat from Wuhan in October 1938, when Chiang had ordered that Changsha be burned. If the Japanese could capture the city, then they would hold Hunan, one of the great breadbasket provinces of central China. From there, the way to Sichuan in the west would lie open, and they could hope to defeat Chiang’s regime in Chongqing once and for all. But the Japanese assault on Changsha failed. The Cantonese general Xue Yue defended the city brilliantly, using a combination of formal field warfare along with guerrilla tactics to lure the Japanese into ambushes and prevent them from resupplying themselves. Changsha remained in Chinese hands.2 The Nationalist military now seized the initiative with a series of offensives across the whole country, bringing together eighty divisions of troops. In a series of coordinated attacks, the army was to strike out and recapture huge swathes of territory,

from Yan Xishan’s former area of control in Shanxi province in north-central China to Guangxi in the southwest.

Instead of being able to deploy troops aggressively to retake captured territory, the Nationalists found themselves on the defensive once more. Two months of fierce fighting finally repelled the Japanese advance, but the momentum for the Nationalists’ Winter Offensive had been utterly lost.

In the summer of 1940 the Zero managed to knock out all of the aircraft that protected Chongqing from the sky, leaving the city even more vulnerable to air raids.3 As had happened so often before, an initially successful Nationalist assault had turned into a disaster. Chiang’s troubles were made even worse by events some eight thousand kilometers away in Europe. In the late summer of 1939 two events changed the face of the conflict: the expected outbreak of war between Germany and Britain along with France, and the unexpected outbreak of peace between Germany and its ideological foe the USSR. The latter was marked by the announcement on August 23, 1939, of the signing of a nonaggression pact between Moscow and Berlin, perhaps the most astounding ideological reversal of the twentieth century. A week later, on September 1, Nazi Germany’s troops invaded Poland, and war with Britain and France followed two days later. At a stroke, the attention of the European powers was concentrated on their own fight for survival. The war in East Asia, already a secondary concern for them, now became a minor matter indeed.

The first years of the European war were a bewildering period of diplomatic cross-dressing. The Nationalist government had earlier enjoyed a brief dalliance with Nazi Germany. Hitler’s regime did in fact continue to supply Chiang’s government with munitions in the early months of its war with Japan.5 The Anti-Comintern Pact signed in 1936 had, in theory, bound together Germany, Italy, and Japan as the Axis, but they were always too mistrustful of one another to create a genuine alliance. Chiang found it useful to hint to the Western powers that he might be forced into a partnership with Germany, a particularly alarming prospect for the USSR, which had enemies both to the west and the east. But the contradictions in German policy toward East Asia finally became too great, and in April 1938 Germany bowed to Japanese demands and ceased to support China.

The Nationalists’ efforts to gain US support were more effective. At the Nine-Power Conference held in Brussels in November 1937, the Chinese delegation had been unable to convince the United States to impose sanctions and confront Japan. By mid-1938, however, American attitudes had begun to change. As Japan moved further southward into China, it became increasingly clear that the occupied country would be closed to outside trade. In December 1938, US treasury secretary Henry Morgenthau facilitated a private loan of $25 million to China, to be repaid in kind with supplies of tung oil (a varnishing product).

While Western attention focused on the darkening situation in Europe, a battle that would shape the conflict in East Asia took place on the borders of Outer Mongolia, Manchukuo, and the eastern part of the Soviet Union. Through much of 1938 and early 1939 one faction of the Japanese Imperial Army had attempted to pressure the Soviets on their eastern border. It appeared that the USSR might be an easy target; Stalin’s paranoid purges meant that many of the Red Army’s best officers had been executed or sent to Siberia. In May 1939 a dispute flared up near the village of Nomonhan between troops stationed in the Soviet client state of Mongolia and Japanese troops from Manchukuo. Within days both sides had built up their forces, with nearly 60,000 Soviet troops facing nearly 40,000 troops of the Kwantung Army. For the next four months, until mid-September, the two powers fought an epic battle that

ended with Japan’s resounding defeat and cemented the reputation of General Georgi Zhukov, later one of Stalin’s most decorated generals during the Second World War. The despised Soviet Army had fought fiercely, and not only was a cease-fire declared, but the two sides also signed a nonaggression pact, ending Chiang’s hopes of a Chinese-Soviet alliance.7 The crowning blow came in the aftermath of events in the frozen north of Europe. In the Winter War of 1939–1940 the Soviets invaded Finland, prompting Britain and France to sponsor a motion expelling the USSR from the League of Nations. At the time, China was a member of the League Council, and it refused to exercise its power of veto on the motion.8 The Soviets were furious at Chiang’s failure to prevent their expulsion, and for the rest of China’s war with Japan the relationship between Chiang and Stalin would remain deeply mistrustful. China would have to fight Japan without further major Soviet assistance.

On June 6 five major Japanese ministers held a meeting in Wang’s absence, in which they made it clear that a regime run by him would only be one part of a wider patchwork of Japanese client regimes in China; Wang’s dream of reuniting China under his rule was dead before he had arrived. In addition, Japanese demands on China would be harsh, including economic and military dominance across all of China’s territory. The only senior minister who was willing even to make a show of discussing terms was Itagaki Seishirô, the minister of war. Yet Itagaki made it clear that he would not support the dissolution of the rival client governments, particularly the “Reformed” government that had its capital at Beiping and controlled much of north China. Japan had won control of north China in war and was not going to give it up lightly.

Attempts by Wang, now back in Shanghai, to establish dominance over Wang Kemin’s “Provisional” government and the other rival “Reformed” government under Liang Hongzhi, based in Nanjing, ended with all three leaders unwilling to work with the others.

Japanese troops and “advisers” were to be stationed all over China, undermining Wang’s argument that his government would restore the Nationalists to sovereignty. New concessions were made in key industries such as coal and ore mining, and the Japanese Navy was to be given control over Hainan island in the south. In spite of Wang’s dreams of reunification, north China was to be kept separate, and Shanghai was also to be given special status (that is, with special privileges for the Japanese). The terms were almost entirely one-sided, and the signing of the agreement on December 30, 1939, was a gloomy affair.11 Still, the negotiations had established that there would be a “reorganized” Nationalist government, led by Wang Jingwei, with its capital at Nanjing.

There were no indications that Chinese determination to continue resistance had lessened, despite the uncertainties in the international situation, friction in the “United Front,” and the severe strain of war on the national economy. General Chiang Kai-shek retained the confidence of the nation and his influence was effective in settling the difficulties which arose between various factions in the government . . . One important factor in maintaining and increasing Chinese determination to resist was the ruthless Japanese bombing of civilian populations, the most murderous instance of which occurred in Chungking in May.

Had he known of this positive assessment, Chiang Kai-shek would have valued it. China’s situation was precarious by the spring of 1940. In March high-level Japanese negotiators tried to secure an agreement with Chiang in Chongqing, while Wang Jingwei was attempting to formalize his own Nationalist government in Nanjing. This strategy, known in Chinese as the Tong Operation, and in Japanese as Operation Kiri, led to talks in Hong Kong between March 7 and 10, 1940. The Nationalists were