Episode 557: The First, Second World War

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1:02in Asia. So let's backtrack. On the night of the 7th of July, 1937, a company of Japanese soldiers was conducting exercises in the dark, dusty ground outside a small walled town near Beijing. The town guarded the approaches to the city, and beside it ran an old beautiful stone bridge. Eleven arches lined with carved lions. A bridge so admired that 600 years earlier, the traveler Marco Polo, had supposedly praised it. And so it carried his name in the west, the Marco Polo Bridge. The Japanese had a right to be there, or at least said they did. Under a tangle of old treaties that led foreign troops, garrison parts of China, they were firing blanks in a night maneuver. And then in the confusion, one of their soldiers could not be found. A single private head wandered off to relieve himself. As it turned out, he came back on arm within the hour, but the Japanese commander did not know that yet.

2:03He demanded the right to enter the walled town to search for the missing man. The Chinese garrison refused. Shots were fired in the darkness, to this day known as certain by whom. And from that small, almost absurd spark, a misplaced soldier, a tent stand off a few rounds fired in the night, a fire caught that would not be put out for eight years. We're taught that the Second World War began at dawn on the 1st of September 1939, when as we talked about last time the German tanks rolled into Poland. And that's where things stood at the end of the last episode. But today, I want to suggest something that should unsettle that neat day, because for roughly a fifth of the human race, the war did not begin in a poll. In the Polish field in 1939, it had already been raging for full two years. By the time Hitler invaded Poland, the Chinese had buried hundreds of thousands of their dead. Their capital had already fallen. Their greatest city had already been the site of one of the most terrible atrocities of the entire war. Maybe the Second World War didn't begin in Europe at all.

3:04Maybe it began here in Asia, on a stone bridge outside Beijing, on a summer night in 1937. But today is the story of the war that came first. So tonight, we're going to turn away from Europe entirely and we're going to look east. And we're going to do three things. I want us to try to understand why. Why an island nation that had been a feudal backwater less than a century before came marching across China? And to that extent, we've talked about it before, but we'll do a very quick recap, so we understand. Second, we're going to follow the war itself from that night at the Markov Holo bridge through the end of 1939, through the inferno of Shanghai, the horror of Nanjing, and into the long-grinding stalemate that followed. And third, and here's the critical takeaway for today. I want to lay the groundwork for a collision that hasn't happened yet, but is already in these years becoming inevitable. And I'm talking about the collision between Japan and the United States. Because the road that ends at Pearl Harbor in December of 1941, that road is being paved

4:09right now, in the years that I'm about to cover. By the end of this episode, you'll see the trap closing, even though the men inside it can't see it yet themselves. So let's begin quickly again with how Japan got here, Todd. Because to understand in 1937, you have to understand that two countries moving in opposite directions. So beginning with Japan again, in the middle of the 19th century, Japan had been a closed feudal society. But then in 1853, under American warships and Commodore Perry, Tokyo was forced to open. It was a profound humiliation, but the Japanese drew from it a lesson that they would never forget. They had also looked across the sea and seen a different story. They saw China, the magnificent middle kingdom, and it was being carved up by European empires. Its port sea used its sovereignty stripped away. And so Japan decided to modernize almost immediately, and it worked very, very quickly, because within a few decades, Japan had transformed itself from a victim of imperialism into an

5:13imperial power and its own right. And then it started to win. In 1895, Japan crushed China in a short war and took Taiwan. In 1905, Japan defeated Russia, a great European power in a full-scale war. And then in 1910, Japan annexed Korea outright and gained a foothold in Manchuria in China's northeast. So by the time of the first world war, which Japan entered on the Allied side, Japan had arrived as a genuine world power. But of course, there was still a lot of resentment here, and this is something that I do want to highlight. I talked about it before, but I think it's important to recognize that that resentment is going to start to drive Japanese foreign policy, at least vis-à-vis the other European and Western powers. Because arriving as a world power didn't mean being treated as one. And the resentment that starts to build here, it matters a lot for our story. At the Paris Peace Conference in 1919, Japan proposed a simple clause for the New League

6:17of Nations, a statement of racial equality, a recognition that nations should not be discriminated against by race. The Western powers led by the United States and the British, they killed that. And a few years later, at a naval conference in Washington, the Great Powers agreed to limit their battleship fleets by a fixed ratio. In Japan was assigned a permanently inferior allotment, smaller than Britain's, smaller than America's, treated in its own eyes as a second-class nation. And in 1924, the United States passed an immigration law that in effect slammed the door on Japanese immigrants entirely, singling them out as a race as unwelcome. Each of these was a wound to Japanese pride, and together they fed a poisonous narrative that the Western powers would never accept Japan as an equal. They meant to keep Japan boxed in and subordinate forever. Now of course, add to this the deepest problem of all that's going to start to run as a threat throughout this whole story.

7:19And the one that drives everything that follows. Japan is a small mountainous island nation, and it's desperately poor in natural resources. It has almost no oil, little iron ore, limited coal of the right kind, not enough farmland to feed a growing population. A modern industrial and military power needs all of these things. And Japan had to import nearly all of them. That dependence was a knife at the nation's throat, because whoever controlled the supply of oil and iron controlled Japan's destiny. And so a powerful idea to call them among Japanese nationalists, and especially in the army, that Japan could never be truly secure, never truly independent, until it controlled its own sources of raw materials, until it builds an empire on the Asian mainland that can make itself sufficient. They called it a turkey. Security through conquest. And then of course, the 1930s arrived, and they radicalized everything.

8:22The Great Depression devastated Japan. It's export markets collapsed. The silk trade that sustained the countryside cratered, and rural families fell into desperate poverty and even starvation. In the mix of that crisis, Japan's fragile democracy of the 1920s buckled, and the military surged into the vacuum. And this is one of the strangest and most dangerous features of Japan in this era. The army was increasingly out of control. Not just the civilians, but of its own high command, junior officers fired with ultra-nationalist fervor and the cult of the emperor, took policy into their own hands sometimes through assassination. Moderate politicians were murdered. There were attempted coups. There was even a word for this dynamic in Japanese. Kiku Kuku, the old little lower overcoming the higher. Field commanders launched aggressions on their own initiative and dared the government in Tokyo to disown them, knowing that it wouldn't. The tail was now wagging the dog in Japan, and the tail wanted to go to war.

9:27And guess what? It had already started one, because as we talked about before in 1931, officers of Japan's Kwotong army, stage of fake sabotage of a Japanese railway in Manchuria, and blamed on the Chinese. And they used that as a pretext to conquer the whole of Manchuria. Tokyo was just presented with this as a fate of conflict and went along. Japan installed a puppet state there that had called Manchuko with the last Emperor of China sitting his figurehead. When the League of Nations investigated and condemned the aggression, Japan responded by simply walking out of the league. There would be no consequences yet. Yet. And of course, as we talked about the other Asia to China, we found a nation going the opposite direction, not rising, but fragmenting. We saw in 1911 how the ancient imperial system collapsed. And then the warlord period that followed, finally reunifying under Chiang Kai's Shek. But then just at the exact same time that that happens, the rising communist movement led by Mao Zey Deng ultimately comes into conflict with them.

10:31And so we have these two sides fighting each other at the point, going back and forth with and back and forth. Honestly, in China, the nationalists and the communists probably would have just continued to fight each other to the death, were it not for the fact that the Japanese kept eating away at Chinese territory after taking Manchuria. And so the nationalists and the communist form an uneasy alliance, a second United Front. It was fragile, full of mutual hatred, and it wouldn't last the war. But it meant one decisive thing. When the Japanese struck in the summer of 1937, China would not collapse and surrender, it would resist. And so that's the board all set on the eve of war. A Japan that is powerful, agreed to resource start, and gripped by a military that hungers for empire and answers to no one. A China that was weak, divided, and bleeding from within. But had just at that last moment decided it would fight. And all it took was a spark and that spark came on the 7th of July, 1937, when that private

11:33war went missing on a dark stone bridge. After the shots at the Marco Polo Bridge, there was a brief deceptive moment when it looked as though the incident might be contained. There were local negotiations, then a shaky truce. But the forces driving toward war were stronger than the forces for peace. The Japanese army saw an opportunity to seize all of northern China and pressed for escalation. Chiang Kai-shek, his back stiffened by the new resolve to resist, declared that this time China would not retreat. Then if it yielded here, there would be no end to the yielding. Reinforcements poured in on both sides. Within weeks the fighting spread, and by the end of July, the Japanese had taken Beijing and the Great Port of Tanjin. The local clash had now become a war. Now one strange and revealing detail, neither side ever formally declared it.

12:34To the very end, Japan officially called this not a war, but the quote unquote China incident. Partly this was the old game of pretending each new aggression was just a limited police action. But there was a colder calculation going on here as well. The United States had passed neutrality laws that would cut off the sale of weapons and war materials to any nation that had declared war. And since Japan imported far more of those materials than China did, a formal declaration of war would have hurt Japan more than its victim. So the largest war in Asia in centuries was fought on paper as a incident. Now hold that thought about American materials because it's going to matter enormously. The Shanghai Shack now made a faithful decision. Rather than let the war be fought only in the north, and ground that favored Japan's tanks and cavalry, he chose to open up a second front of the south in Shanghai, China's

13:35largest and richest city, its great cosmopolitan port, home to foreign concessions, full of British, American, and French residents, and the watching eyes of the world's press. By forcing a battle in Shanghai, Shanghai Shack hoped to draw the world's attention and sympathy to show that China would fight and to bog the Japanese down in brutal urban combat where their mobility counted for a lot less. By August 1937, he committed his very best troops, his elite German trained divisions, the cream of the Chinese crop to the defense of that city. Now the Battle of Shanghai lasted for three months and it was a slaughter. The Japanese poured in troops and unleashed their full weight of their navy and air force. The Chinese fought building by building, street by street, with a tenacity that astonished foreign observers who had expected a quick collapse. The international press watched it all from the safety of the foreign settlement, and

14:37the images that traveled around the world were horrific. One photograph in particular, a burned and wailing baby, alone in the wreckage of a bombed railway station, became one of the most famous images of the entire war. And it did more to turn American public opinion against Japan than a hundred diplomatic protests. But sympathy did not win battles. The Chinese held for three terrible months, and then in November, fresh Japanese landings down the coast threatened to encircle them and the line broke. Shanghai fell, and in holding it, Shanghai's check had lost the irreplaceable core of his modern army. Tens of thousands of his best trained men gone. It was a moral victory, bought at a catastrophic price. Worse was coming, with Shanghai taken, the Japanese army drove inland up the Yangtze River toward the Chinese capital Nanjiang, and the discipline that had held, however thinly, began to dissolve into something monstrous.

15:39The retreating Chinese simply couldn't hold the capital. The government fled westward, the city fell on the 13th of December, 1937. And then for weeks, the Japanese army did to Nanjiang, something that the world still troubles to comprehend. I'm going to speak about this carefully, because I think it deserves both honesty and gravity. What the Japanese army carried out in Nanjiang over those weeks was one of the great atrocities of the 20th century, a lot of atrocities. We're talking about a sustained orgy of mass murder of the killing of prisoners and civilians of like, of rape on a vast scale of looting and burning. The exact death toll has been argued about ever since, and the numbers cited range endormously. The Chinese figure is 300,000 scholars estimates very wildly below that, but no serious account disputes that the debt numbered in the tens of thousands at the very least and very likely

16:40far more, and that the cruelty was systematic and prolonged. A handful of foreigners who stayed behind, businessmen, missionaries, doctors set up a small safety zone and sheltered tens of thousands of Chinese and their diaries and letters remain among the most harrowing documents of the age. The rape of Nanjiang, that's what it came to be called. It has seared itself into Chinese memory where it remains a living wound to this day, and it told the watching world beyond any propaganda what kind of a war Japan was now waging. And in the middle of those December days, one more event small in the scale of Nanjings or but enormous for our story happened. On the 12th of December 1937, Japanese aircraft attacked and sank in American gunboat. The USS Penai, as it sat on the Yangtze River, evacuating Americans from the fighting. The ship was clearly marked with American flags. Several men were killed.

17:41It was, honestly, by any international measure, an attack on the United States. Potokyo was alarmed and scrambled to apologize. They called it a mistake, they promised to pay an indemnity, and the crisis was diffused. With a message had been delivered, and the Americans had heard it, Japanese power was now spilling out across China, with such violence that it would kill Americans and sink American ships. The collision was no longer something to imagine in the abstract. And it already, to a large extent, happened. By the end of 1937, before the war in Europe had even begun, China had lost its greatest city and its capital, buried a generation of its best soldiers, and suffered an atrocity that it would never forget. It still, it would not surrender. Now, here's the thing that the Japanese never really understood.

18:44The miscalculation of the heart of their whole adventure, they kept winning over and over and over again, and it just kept not mattering enough. It's like a fight where one boxer is landing all the blows, but it's just not doing any damage. The Japanese plan to the extent there was a single plan, assumed that a few sharp shocks, the loss of a few great cities would shatter Chinese resistance, and force Chiang Kai Shao to the table. It was the same logic by which they had taken Manchuria and Northern China, but Chiang Kai Shao had grasped the one strategy that could defeat a stronger enemy. He would not try to win, he would just refuse to lose. China is vast, almost unimaginably vast, and Chiang Kai Shao resolved to trade that vastness for time, he trades space for time. Let the Japanese have the coast, the cities, the railways. We'll just pull the government, the armies, the factories, the universities, the very heart of the nation, back and back, deeper and deeper into an immense interior that can encompass huge mountain ranges, vast deserts, you name it, beyond the reach of Japanese mechanized

19:49power and make the enemy chase them across a country that's simply too big to hold. Bleed the invader dry, wait for the wider world to change and survive. And so the capital simply became transient. It moved from Nanjing, the government first fled into the city of Wuhan and central China, and then when Wuhan was threatened it moved again, far up the Yangtze, through the dramatic gorgeous, the city of Chongqing, wrinked by mountains deep in the southwestern interior, there, behind the mountains, the fog, swamps and rivers, China's government would hold out for the rest of the war. Through 1938, the Japanese kept advancing and the Chinese kept making them pay. In the spring, there came a rare and electrifying Chinese victory at a town called Cha Huang, where Chinese forces trapped in badly mauled a Japanese army, a triumph that sent a surge of hope through the country and proved the Japanese were not invincible. But the broader tide still ran one away.

20:50To slow the Japanese drive in the summer of 1938, Chang's forces resorted to an act of terrible desperation. They deliberately blew up in the great dicks of the Yellow River, unleashing the flood across the plains to wash the invaders advance away. It worked, kind of. The Japanese advance was checked for a time, but the river drowned the land for thousands of square miles, killing hundreds of thousands of Chinese peasants and driving millions from their homes. China was now destroying itself to slow the enemy, sacrificing its own people by hundreds of thousands to buy a few months. This, unfortunately, is the dark arithmetic of a war of survival. The great industrial city of Wuhan finally fell in October 1938 after a month's long battle, and in the same month the southern port of Canton fell as well. And then something significant happened. Or rather, I guess, stop happening. The Japanese advances slowed.

21:50The front lines hardened. Japan now held a vast swath of China. Its entire coast, the major cities, the railway lines that connected them. But to be honest, held here is kind of a generous word. The Japanese controlled the cities and the railways, what observers called the points and the lines. But they did not control the immense countryside in between, where Chinese guerrillas, both nationalist and increasingly communist, harried them endlessly. Japan had conquered more territory than it could ever passify, and had not achieved the one thing it actually needed, a Chinese surrender. I think I should not yield, and from his mountain fortress at Chongqing, he kept the war alive. By 1939, the war had settled into a bloody grinding stalemate, the Quagmire, that people from World War I would have recognized. And so Japan tried to break it by other means, unable to defeat China militarily, the Japanese turned to politics, seeking out Chinese collaborators to set up puppet governments that might give

22:56their conquest a veneer of legitimacy. A senior nationalist figure named Wang Jingwei, defected to the Japanese side, and would before long had a collaborationist regime, much like the Vichy regime in France. And Japan turned to terror from the air, too, subjecting the wartime capital at Chongqing to a long, savage, campaign of bombing aimed squarely at the civilian population, trying to break China's will with fire from the sky, but it didn't work. The will didn't break. The Chinese dug shelters into the rock beneath the city, and they continued to endure. China was bent nearly to the ground, but it was not broken. And as long as it was not broken, Japan was trapped. It had a war could not win and could not end, swallowing more men and more money and more oil with every passing month. And almost every drop of that oil was coming from one place. And so we need at the end here to follow that thread because it leads straight across

23:57the Pacific. Now, let's step back from the battlefields of China and look out at the wider strategic situation. Because in 1939, in the year the war in Asia quietly changed direction, pivoting away from China and toward a far larger and more dangerous confrontation. To see how we have to understand three things, a clash of visions, a battle on a remote frontier, and a knife at Japan's throat called oil. Let's start with the clash of visions. Because at the bottom of what would drive Japan and the United States to war, we have to come back to ideology, which we talked about as sort of a hallmark of the Second World War. Japan dreamed of what it called a new order in East Asia. A vast sphere across China and beyond, dominated by Japan, sealed off, self-sufficient with resources and markets. Japan believed it needed to survive as a great power. Asia for the Asians, the slogan went, though it practiced it meant Asia for the Japanese. The United States held to a directly opposing principle when it had championed for 40 years.

25:02The open door policy. America insisted that China should remain territorially intact and open to the trade of all nations equally, that no single power should be allowed to slam the door and monopolize it. Japan's whole project in China was a frontal assault on that principle. America had already refused to recognize the puppet state of Manchuria. Now it watched as Japan tried to swallow China whole. These two visions could not both be satisfied. One of them would have to give way. For most of the 1930s, that clash stayed in the realm of protest and principles. What turned it toward real collision was a question of direction. And that question was settled in all places on a barren stretch of grassland on the border between Japanese held Manchuria and Soviet allied Mongolia in the summer of 1939. Japan's leaders had long argued among themselves about where the empire should expand next.

26:04Some factions strong in the army wanted to strike north. To attack the Soviet Union, seize the resources of Siberia and settle the old score with Japan's great rival on the Asian mainland. The other factions strong in the Navy wanted to strike south to drive into Southeast Asia into the rich European colonies there and seize the oil and rubber and tin the Japan's with desperately needed. North against Russia, south against the resources. North against the Western empires that held them. In the summer of 1939, strike north school got its answer and it was brutal. At a place called Numbhan or Cuckinghole, Japanese and Soviet forces collided in a full scale on declared border war. The Japanese expected to win. But a then obscured general who's going to come back in our story named Gregorius Zukov, assembled a powerful mechanized force in August delivered a crushing and circling defeat

27:05that shattered the Japanese assault. The lesson landed hard in Tokyo. The Red Army was far stronger than had been believed and a war against the Soviet Union would be a catastrophe. So strike north that idea was for all practical purposes dead. And the timing was extraordinary because in that very same month of August 1939, Japan suffered a second stunning shock, this one a betrayal. Japan had a partner against communism and it signed an anti-communist pact with Nazi Germany and regarded the Soviet Union as a shared enemy. And then out of nowhere came the news that Germany, Japan's own partner, had signed a non-aggression pact with Stalin. The Nazis had made a deal with the very power Japan was fighting on the Mongolian frontier. Tokyo was blindsided and humiliated. The government in power actually fell over it. Its prime minister declared that the situation in Europe had become and he's bewildered

28:05words, complicated and inscrutable. Japan felt abandoned by Berlin, isolated and freshly convinced. It could rely on no one but itself. Now let's put all these pieces together. Strike north is discredited. Germany has betrayed Japan and neutralized the Soviet threat from the other side. The war in China grinds on, unwinnable and devouring resources. And so through 1939 the strategic momentum in Tokyo swung decisively towards strike south towards Southeast Asia. But look at what laid to the south. British, Malaysia and Burma, the duchy's indies with its enormous oil fields, the very oil that Japan craves, French Indochina and the Philippines, a possession of the United States. To strike south for the resources Japan needed was inevitably to strike at the British, the duchy and the Americans. The road to the oil ran straight through western empires in the Pacific. Japan's solution to its resource problem pointed it directly at war with the United States.

29:10And here's the cruelest, not of all. That oil knife at Japan's throat. Well where was Japan getting the oil in the scrap iron and the steel to fight its war from China in the first place? The answer overwhelmingly is from the United States. By late the 1930s, something like three or four fifths of Japan's oil was American. The very weapons then the fuel that Japan was using to conquer China were being sold to it by the nation most opposed to that conquest. America held in its own hands the power to strangle the Japanese war machine by simply turning off the tap. And as news from China, Nanjing, the Panai, the bombing of cities turned American opinion ever harder against Japan, pressure built in Washington to do just that. And so in 1939, the United States took its first real step toward the embargo America had earlier discouraged the sale of aircraft to Japan.

30:13Now in the summer of 1939, the Roosevelt administration formally gave notice that it would cancel its long standing commercial treaty with Japan on its face. It was a dry diplomatic maneuver, but in reality, it was a loaded gun placed on the table. Ending the treaty cleared the legal path for the United States to impose real economic sanctions to begin cutting off oil and scrap and steel whenever it chose. It was a warning and Tokyo understood it as one. It was simple. The Americans were saying, keep going in this direction. We will just starve your war. And so we arrive at the end of 1939 with two nations locked in a slow mutual vice. A trap with honestly no obvious exit. The Americans were telling Japan get out of China, respect the open door or we will choke off the resources that keep your armies moving. But for Japan's leaders, getting out of China was unthinkable. It would mean admitting that all the blood and treasure poured into the China incident have been spent for nothing. A humiliation no government could survive.

31:16And if the Americans really did cut off the oil, then Japan would only have one way left to get it to seize the oil fields of the South by force, which meant war with the West. Each path led toward catastrophe. The Japanese were beginning to feel that they had to choose between backing down, which they could not bear, and lunging forward, which might destroy them. None of this was settled yet. The full embargo was still in the future. The fateful decisions were still two years away. But by the end of 1939, the logic that would end at Pearl Harbor was already in place. Turning. Like a machine that had been switched on and could not be switched off.