Rise of China - Battle for Survival
[Music]
China 1937. Tensions have been rising on the border with Manjo Gua, a puppet state run by an increasingly militaristic Japan. So far, China’s nationalist leader, Chiang Kai-shek, has carefully avoided a major confrontation. His strategy has been to buy time to eliminate his internal communist enemies first. But bowing to increasing anti-Japanese sentiment across China, he has concluded a truce with the communists.
On the 7th of July at the Marco Polo Bridge outside Ping, there’s an argument over a missing Japanese soldier and shots are fired. Within days, Japanese reinforcements flood the area. But this time, China is ready to push back.
In a speech made 10 days after the Marco Polo Bridge incident, Shiang Kaishek warns of the struggle ahead. Let our people fully understand the meaning of the limit of endurance and the scale of sacrifice implied. For once that stage is reached, we can only sacrifice and fight to the bitter end. The national mood is summed up by a popular song, March of the Volunteers.
In 1978, March of the Volunteers will become China’s official national anthem. The fighting around Ping rapidly escalates into a full-scale invasion. Some historians consider this the moment World War II begins. Chiang Kaishek’s National Revolutionary Army, the NRA, is in the unusual position of receiving support from both the Soviet Union and Nazi Germany. But it’s not enough to hold back the Japanese Imperial Army.
With superior tactics, modern equipment, and air superiority, they smash through Chinese defenses. Within 6 weeks, nearly 200,000 Japanese troops have occupied a broad swathe of northern China, including the old imperial capital Ping. But it’s in Shanghai that both sides will plunge into the abyss.
[Music]
Shanghai is the largest city in China and its commercial and cultural capital. The heart of the city is the international settlement established by Western imperial powers in the 19th century and jointly run by 14 countries including Japan. The Japanese have recently overtaken the British as the largest foreign presence in Shanghai with 30,000 civilians as well as 8,000 marines and 32 naval vessels.
Chiang Kaishek sees an opportunity to divert the Japanese from their northern offensive while also bringing the war to international attention. On the 13th of August, he orders Chinese forces to attack Japanese ships moored in Shanghai. The Japanese send reinforcements. Shanghai and the surrounding region become a major battlefront, drawing in a million troops.
The city is devastated in fierce urban fighting with tanks on the streets, poison gas attacks, and air raids. The NRA suffers heavy losses, particularly to its elite German-trained divisions. In late October, it begins to withdraw. A single battalion is left behind to hold the Sihang warehouse.
In desperate fighting, the Suicide Battalion holds out for six precious days, buying time for other units to escape. Their sacrifice and the horrors of the battle occurred directly under the gaze of foreign observers based in Shanghai’s international settlement where they are shielded from the worst of the fighting. Their images and reports quickly travel around the world and turn Western public opinion firmly against the Japanese.
But what happens next will shock the world.
[Music]
Japanese forces pursue the retreating. NRA to the new nationalist capital, Nanking.
After a ferocious 4-day battle, they enter the city on the 13th of December. The few Westerners inside the city form an international safety zone to shelter themselves and some of the local population. But most Chinese civilians are left to the mercy of the Japanese.
For 6 weeks, Japanese soldiers go on the rampage, looting, torturing, raping, and murdering. The numbers are disputed, but between 50,000 and 300,000 civilians are killed. Around 30,000 Chinese prisoners of war are shot in mass executions. Others are decapitated, buried alive, or used for bayonet practice. Bodies are piled up in the streets, burned, and dumped in the Yangtze River.
The international safety zone is managed by German businessman and Nazi supporter John Raba. He is appalled by the violence and hopes Hitler will intervene to stop the Japanese. Instead, the fall of Nanking convinces the Nazis that Japan is the stronger partner, and Germany cuts off its military support to China.
The rape of Nanking appalls the world. It is condemned by the USA and League of Nations, the international body dedicated to maintaining world peace. But their words are not backed up by action.
Atrocities become a feature of the Japanese war against China. The systematic use of rape as a weapon of war, forced prostitution on a massive scale, and the use of chemical and biological weapons on civilians and prisoners of war killed many thousands.
The Japanese army’s next objective is Wuhan. There is a rare Chinese victory at the battle of Tay Jang, but it is not enough to halt the Japanese. Chiang Kai-shek’s government makes a desperate and fateful decision. The order is given to breach dikes holding back the Yellow River at Hu Yan Ko. The hope is that the floods will stop the Japanese army in its tracks.
In early June, the floodwaters of the Yellow River surged south and east across the densely populated North China plain. There has been no advanced warning to the villages and towns in its path. The consequences are catastrophic. Farmland and entire villages are submerged. Half a million civilians perish, and 5 million are made homeless. The loss of farmland will cause famine and hardship for years to come. One of the greatest man-made disasters in history is committed by the Chinese government against its own people.
The floods failed to stop the Japanese, who merely bypass the affected areas. By the time Chinese and Japanese forces clash near Wuhan, there are nearly 2 million men engaged.
The battle for the city is hard fought with heavy losses on both sides. But once again, Japanese air power and tactics alongside the widespread use of poison gas prove decisive. The city falls after 4 months. The nationalist government retreats 500 miles further inland to Chongqing in the western province of Sichuan.
The Japanese now occupy China’s largest cities and install a new puppet government in Nanking. But despite its victories, the Japanese army is too exhausted to land another major blow. The war enters a stalemate.
Historians label this conflict the second Sino-Japanese war. The Chinese call it the war of resistance. But it is about to become a crucial front in a world war. By 1939, China’s only major foreign backer is the Soviet Union. It provides crucial supplies, and its pilots and aircraft make up most of the nationalist air force. The Soviets are fighting their own war against Japan, a widely forgotten conflict on Russia’s far eastern frontier.
But that summer, with war looming in Europe, Stalin makes a truce with Japan. It is signed on the 15th of September. Two days later, Soviet troops invade Poland. As allies of Nazi Germany, despite losing its major foreign ally, China fights on against the Japanese occupation.
Chongqing becomes a nationalist redoubt, pummeled by more than 200 Japanese air raids. While in northern China, communists carry out large-scale guerilla attacks on the Japanese. But all cooperation between communists and nationalists has once more been broken off.
The nationalists now receive foreign arms and supplies via French Indo-China, today Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. So in 1940, Japan occupies French Indochina to cut the link. But this fresh act of Japanese imperialism alarms the Western powers whose Southeast Asian colonies are now within range of Japanese forces.
The US, Britain, and the Dutch impose an oil embargo on Japan, which threatens to destabilize its economy and its war effort in China. The Western powers hope Japan will back down. But in Tokyo, the decision is taken to gamble on war.
In December 1941, the Japanese launch a surprise attack on the US naval base at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii. They simultaneously bomb US and British bases across Southeast Asia.
In a series of rapid, bold advances, the Japanese capture British colonies, including Hong Kong and Singapore, the Philippines, and the oil-rich Dutch East Indies. But Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor has woken a sleeping giant.
Within a year, US factories are turning out more vehicles, ships, and aircraft than all the other combatant powers put together. China will be one beneficiary, receiving more than $1.5 billion worth of armaments as part of the US lend-lease program.
When the Japanese take Burma, supplies have to be flown into China from India, a perilous route over the Himalayas known to US pilots as the hump. Chiang Kai-shek also receives a new chief military adviser, the famously acerbic US General Vinegar Joe Stillwell. Stillwell regards Chang as a stubborn, ignorant, prejudiced, and conceited despot.
The loathing is mutual. Chang, like many, finds Stillwell’s arrogant and overbearing manner hard to stomach. Further aid comes in the form of Major General Claire Chenno’s famous Flying Tigers. This elite squadron of American volunteers has remarkable success against the Japanese Air Force.
As the war goes on, more US air units arrive in China, leading to the construction of several US air bases. China is now one of the four major allied powers alongside the US, Britain, and the Soviet Union.
In November 1943, Chang travels to Cairo, Egypt, to attend a conference with British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and US President Franklin Roosevelt. Chinese resistance is tying down nearly a million Japanese soldiers, and they assure Chang of increased support, though in reality neither sees China as a priority.
Yet help is desperately needed. What remains of the Chinese economy is collapsing with rampant inflation. Corruption, and a devastated industrial sector. The nationalist government is struggling to pay its soldiers who desert in growing numbers. Just as Japan is preparing to launch its largest operation of the war.
April 1944, Japan is on the back foot against the Allies in the Pacific. It hopes to salvage the situation with a massive offensive in China to link up northern China with Indo-China and destroy US airfields in the south that are used to bomb Japan. The code name is operation Ichigo. Weakened Chinese forces break under the onslaught. Several US air bases are taken and the connection between north and south is established by October.
Once more, the Chinese military suffers enormous losses. Defeat is another blow to Chang’s reputation. But when Stillwell demands that he be put in direct command of all Chinese forces, Chang gets him replaced. Yet US faith in Chang is fraying. Some contrast nationalist corruption and incompetence with the success of the Chinese communists who continue to wage their guerrilla warfare campaign against the Japanese in the north.
But the success of Operation Ichigo comes too late to save Japan. In the spring of 1945, the last major Japanese offensive in China is defeated and Chinese troops counterattack. US strategic bombing of Japan’s home islands culminates in August 1945 with the dropping of atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nakasaki. Simultaneously, the Soviet Union invades Manchuria. Within a week, Emperor Hirohito announces Japan’s unconditional surrender to the Allies. The Second World War is over. The death toll is staggering. Between 15 and 20 million Chinese lives are lost. Only the Soviet Union suffers more. Then there is the multitude of wounded, the refugees and the destitute. The country will have to undergo complete reconstruction. But who will lead it is still to be settled.
Japan’s defeat leaves a vacuum in China which both nationalists and communists rush to fill from the Soviet Union. The communists receive Manchuria and captured Japanese weaponry, while the US and Britain fly nationalist forces into northern and eastern China. In an effort to prevent open conflict, Chiang Kaishek and Maadong meet for US sponsored talks in Chongqing. The agreement they reach is short-lived. As Chiang Kaishek remarks to his aides, the sky cannot have two sons.
In 1946, civil war erupts as Chang launches an assault on the communist held north. Led by his elite US-trained divisions, the nationalists make advances, taking Shanyang and the Communists wartime base in Yan Han. But the Communists weather the storm, avoiding major battles and sticking to their wartime guerrilla tactics. And in rural areas, their program of land reform attracts many thousands of peasants to their cause. In contrast, the nationalists have been burnishing their reputation for incompetent and corrupt government. Chinese industry and trade have been devastated by war. But economic mismanagement adds to the misery, causing hyperinflation. And despite heavy backing from the US in loans and military supplies, the nationalists are rapidly losing support. in both cities and rural areas.
In 1947, General Lein Bao reorganizes communist forces into the People’s Liberation Army, nearly 1 million strong. Mao decides this is the moment to abandon guerrilla tactics and take on the nationalists in open warfare. In a string of successful counteroffensives, the communists capture territory, weapons, and supplies and conscript deserters and prisoners into their ranks. The tide of war is shifting dramatically.
In September 1948, the People’s Liberation Army launches three major offensives. In the first, Lenin Bao sweeps the Nationalists out of Manchuria. The nationalists lose more than 400,000 men. Only 150,000 are able to escape south. The following month, two simultaneous campaigns lead to the capture of Tien Gene and Zu Joe. It is a disastrous winter for the nationalists who suffer another half a million casualties and lose much of their best military equipment.
In just four months, the communists have won three major victories and driven their enemies from northern China. In the southern cities, there is chaos and lawlessness as nationalist rule breaks down. That spring, the communist advance continues. In April, they take Nanjing. And the following month, China’s largest city, Shanghai.
On the 1st of October 1949, Mao Zedong, chairman of the Chinese Communist Party, stands before a packed Tiananmen Square in Beijing and proclaims the founding of the People’s Republic of China. That winter, the last nationalist-held areas fall to communist forces. It’s estimated more than 2 million soldiers were killed or wounded in the four years of China’s civil war. Perhaps another 5 million civilians perish through fighting, famine, and disease.
Chiang Kai-shek, alongside some 2 million nationalist troops and many refugees, retreats to Taiwan, one of the last territories still under nationalist control. Shanghai will never return to mainland China, where Mao Zedong and the Communist Party are triumphant. Now the work will begin to build a new China from the wreckage of invasion and civil war.
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