China-Burma-India WWII

Japan's ever-closer identification with Germany and Italy in the course of the 1930s was of symbolic rather than practical value: Japan's hope that the Treaty would serve to check the Soviet Union was to prove stillborn. The significance of Japan's association with Germany and Italy was not missed, but in the event this need not have been significant. What was far more significant was the outbreak of war in China following a clash between Chinese and Japanese forces outside Peking on 7 July 1937. At first this encounter did not seem unduly important: there was every possibility that it could be resolved by the Japanese in exactly the same way that numerous incidents in northern China had been resolved over the four previous years. After overrunning Manchuria in 1931-2 the Japanese had set about a deliberate encroachment on Chinese territory: Jehol was invaded and occupied in January-February 1933 and the Chinese squeezed from Hopei in June 1935 and from Charar in the following month.

In the aftermath of the clash of July 1937 the Japanese, by their standards, were restrained, confining themselves to the occupation of Tientsin and Peking. There was good and obvious reason for such restraint, not least the paucity of Japanese forces in northern China, but in the event the determination of the Kwantung Army in Manchuria to further its ambitions in Inner Mongolia and the outbreak of fighting in Shanghai on 13 August pushed Japan towards general war: by the end of September the Japanese Army had dispatched ten divisions to northern China and another five to Shanghai, primarily to rescue the naval formations which had provoked the August clash in an attempt to ensure that the army did not steal a march on its sister service in matters Chinese.

In reality, deeper forces were at work in producing Japan's 'special undeclared war' with China, specifically China's attempts after December 1936 to resolve her civil wars in order to present a united front to future Japanese aggression. Within the Japanese high command, therefore, there were elements that sought to forestall such a development, and with the spread of war, and the inability of Tokyo either to contain the conflict or to end it by negotiation, Japanese operations quickly assumed their own momentum. Within four months of the outbreak of general war, the Kwantung Army had secured Inner Mongolia and installed a puppet regime at Kueisui while by the end of 1937 much of China north of the Yellow River - considered by some of the Japanese military to be the minimum sphere of influence that was acceptable - had been overrun. It was in central China, however, that the main story unfolded, specifically the Japanese capture of Shanghai in November and Nanking, amid scenes of mass murder, rape, torture and pillage, in December.

In the course of 1938 Japanese forces in northern China cleared Shansi and Shantung and advanced to the Pinglu-Kaifeng-Hsuchow-Taierhchwang line, while from their positions on the lower Yangtse the Japanese were able to develop offensives that cleared Anhwei north of the river and moved into the Wuhan cities, the Chinese having ceded the middle Yangtse in order to withdraw into the fastness of Kweichow and Hunan. With the simultaneous seizure of Canton, Japanese success in the course of 1938 was impressive, yet it represented failure, and for obvious reason: the basic dilemmas which had proved so intractable during the Chinese civil wars of the 1920s presented themselves anew. The Japanese were confronted by the basic question of whether to seek to destroy the Nationalist regime of Chiang Kai-shek or to preserve it as the only authority that might deliver a negotiated settlement. They also faced the related problem of whether to sponsor rival regimes in an attempt to put pressure on the Nationalists to come to a settlement, or as genuine alternatives to the Nationalist government in Chungking. But either and both of these sets of alternatives concealed the real problem. Japan did not embark upon the conquest of northern and central China in order to provide alternatives to her own rule: Japan sought to secure the power of decision exclusively for herself, and certainly never understood any force of nationalist aspiration other than her own.

Moreover, success in the field merely confirmed the truth of the Clausewitzian observation that it is easy to conquer but hard to occupy. In the vastness of China it was impossible to force a military victory, while by the beginning of 1938 guerrilla warfare had taken hold in many areas nominally under Japanese control, even as banditry revived inside Manchuria as a result of the reduction of the Japanese garrisons in order to provide for operations in China. With the Nationalists having opted for 'a sustained strategy of attrition' that in the end the Japanese could never counter, 1938 also saw clashes with the Soviets, which in turn presented another conundrum: whether operations in China were to be curtailed in order to ensure the security of Manchuria or developed without reference to the distinct possibility of further, serious clashes with the Soviet Union.

In such a situation, and unable to force battle upon the Chinese Nationalist armies in the wastes of Szechwan, Kweichow and Yunnan, the Japanese undertook the first strategic air campaign in history. Douhet, Mitchell and Trenchard are always paraded as the high priests of air power, specifically strategic bombing, but interestingly the first person to have committed to paper the idea of breaking an enemy's will to resist by a bombing campaign directed against a civilian population was a Japanese naval officer, Nakajima Chikuhei, in 1915. The first such employment of air power came as early as August 1937, and in summer 1938 the Japanese undertook a terror bombing campaign against Canton; in May 1939 the Japanese launched their first attacks on Chungking. In spring-summer 1940, however, the Japanese launched Operation 101, a systematic campaign against Chinese cities in the interior, primarily Chungking, with a view to breaking Chinese morale. A year later, in spring-summer 1941, the Japanese renewed their attempt with Operation 102, but this was a halting affair as Japanese naval aircraft were in the process of being withdrawn from China in readiness for operations in south-east Asia and the Pacific.

The two offensives produced interesting results, although not the ones that the Japanese sought. Chinese cities, on account of their massive concentrations of people and generally flimsy construction, were peculiarly vulnerable to bombing, and a number of them, most obviously Chungking, were all but razed. With their populations either driven out or underground, Chinese morale faltered under the initial blows, but it did not break. Moreover, the Japanese were to find that the effectiveness of their raids was directly dependent upon fighters first having secured air superiority: before August 1940 and the commitment of the A6M Zero-sen long-range fighter to the battle, Japanese losses were all but prohibitive. As it was, both Operation 101 and Operation 102 were conducted on a scale that was too small to have realistic chances of success - the total effort involved in Operation 101 was less in terms of aircraft sorties and bomb load than those directed against Dresden in February 1945 - and, critically, this last-resort option failed. The army and navy air forces were not able to record a result that the Japanese military could not achieve on the ground, and the China war remained thereafter, as it had been since 1937, unwinnable by military means.