Many people remember the cause of the European conflict during World War II, but few of them remember how the Asian conflict had also started during that same time. Unlike what most people assume, Japan and Germany did not team up in the sense that most people think. The two governments were both super powers who were interested in complete world domination. It would be contrary to everything that their governments believed in to align himself with someone merely based on a power struggle, which is why the pact between Germany and Russia was broken in a very short period of time.
The reason for Japan’s alliance with Germany and Hitler was because at the same time he was declaring war on Western Europe, Japan was participating in its own conflict in southeastern Asia where it was in a long, embroiled war with China. While Germany had originally supported China in the conflict, they withdrew their support in 1938, basically leaving the way for Japan to continue to war and in a sense giving Japan a form of permission to do so.
The battles between China and Japan had been going on for years as the two countries had been having several different problems and minor conflicts since 1931. But it wasn’t until 1937 that they found themselves completely engulfed by full-blown war. This would become known as the Second Sino-Japanese War, and it was fought before and during the time when the allies entered the Second World War.
The Second-Sino Japanese War was a result of a long-standing feud between the two governments. Japan wanted to try and rule China so that it would have access to its large supply of land and minerals. In the early nineteen thirties Japan found itself almost entirely under military control and this government began a campaign of limited attacks and incidents in Asia as they tried to acquire more and more of the continent’s natural resources in a campaign to increase their Imperial domain. The fighting really started in 1931 in Mukden, but due to Japan’s desire to not have outside countries drawn into the conflict the battles were called “incidents.”
Because of the escalation of these incidents, Japan wanted to keep its citizens feeling comfortable about the impending war, so in propaganda films and posters, it was often referred to as the “holy war.” The government used outlets in media and education to push its agenda through indoctrination and censorship. This insistence that war with China was the right thing to do led to a group being formed that would serve to quash any doubt, The League of Diet Members Believing the Objectives of the Holy War. The purpose of this group was to make sure that anyone who spoke out about the merits of the war was censured.
The First Sino-Japanese War occurred in 1894 between Japan and the Qing Dynasty and it ended with Japan controlling Korea. However, this would also eventually lead to the second war with China as Japan shipped materials and people across Manchuria. It wasn’t long before they wanted to control the shipping route as well as the natural resources in this country. After the attack in Mukden, fighting continued on until the League of Nations (the early version of the modern day U.N.), stepped in and demanded that the incidents stop. In response to what Japan perceived as unfair criticisms of their war with China, they withdrew from the League of Nations in 1933.
Since Japan had already gained control of Manchuria, they set up a hollow government of which China’s Emperor Pu-Yi was the leader, but this was really only an empty title as he had no real power in that portion of the country. However, in 1937, large scale fighting broke out between the two countries when the Japanese were attacked outside of Peking at the Marco Polo Bridge. Once the full war between the two countries had been declared, Japan reached out and quickly captured the coastal cities of Shanghai, Nanjing, and Shanxi and several of the major industrial ports. China was forced to draw its troops to the interior and protect itself.
This war was not pretty by any means of the imagination and several huge tactical errors on the part of the Chinese led to civilian lives that were lost to the Japanese soldiers. There is an estimate that nearly three hundred thousand men, women, and children died in an incident known as the Nanking massacre. This violence against the Chinese lasted for six weeks, from December of 1938 until February 1938 and is sometimes even referred to as the Rape of Nanking become of the war crimes that many of the Japanese soldiers are accused of committing including arson, robber, executions, and rape.
The war continued on as the Japanese pushed into the interior of China’s mainland. However, it wasn’t long before Japan realized that the weak infrastructure of China’s roadways made it nearly impossible to conquer the entire country. In order to more easily facilitate their movement through the country the Japanese military would continue to use the strategy of setting up false governments that were truly loyal to Japan’s interests. The crimes committed by the Japanese, though, made it extremely difficult for these governments to be self-sustaining as a great deal of guerrilla fighting amongst China’s citizenry kept the conquered providences in a state of constant flux. Despite all of these efforts on the part of the Japanese military, it was just a year the two later that the countries found themselves in a deadlock until after the bombing at Pearl Harbor in 1941 when the Allies entered the war.
While Japan did not win the war against China, the Second Sino-Japanese war did have consequences that Japan could not have foreseen at the time the war was started. Even though Japan had already been bombed by the Allied forces and had conceded to loss in the Second World War, the war it had waged against China had left the government there significantly weakened. For years China had become fragmented and many of its citizens had become severely repressed by the warlord-like regime. This left the country’s government wide open to a hostile take over, and in 1949 imperialist China was conquered by the communists led by Mao.