Hump: America's Strategy for Keeping China in World War II

1. From the Marco Polo Bridge to ABC Ferry Command

✪ 14 1 F R O M T H E M A R C O P O L O B R I D G E T O A B C F E R R Y C O M M A N D JULY 1937 TO MARCH 1942 On the muggy evening of July 7, 1937, Japanese soldiers from the North China Garrison Army were on maneuvers on the banks of the Yanting River southwest of Beijing. The Boxer indemnity protocols allowed them to conduct military exercises, even though such actions did little to assuage mounting friction between Chinese and Japanese. Then, just before midnight while the troops were taking a break, they claimed they were fired upon. A brief skirmish ensued, and when the Japanese roll was called, one soldier, Private Kikujiro Shimura, was missing. Assuming the shots were fired by Chinese Nationalists, the Japanese demanded that they be allowed to search for the private in the nearby town of Wanping. Local Chinese officers refused to allow the search, and so the Japanese opened fire and assaulted the town, an attack that was repelled by the Chinese Twenty-ninth Army the next day. To this day, both parties accuse the other of firing the first shots that night, and though precise culpability might be difficult to ascribe, clearly this incident at the Marco Polo Bridge (Lugouqiao in Chinese sources) was merely the spark that ignited the tinderbox of Sino-Japanese tension. Claiming that China was the “sick man of Asia,” the Japanese government was most concerned with checking the on-again, off-again revolution on the mainland, fearing the Soviets would take MARCO POLO BRIDGE TO ABC FERRY COMMAND 15 advantage of Chinese weakness. Occupying Manchuria in 1931 and imposing puppet rule the next year, the Japanese forced the Soviets to sell them the China Eastern Railway four years later. Ever wary of the growing warmth between Moscow and Nanjing, the capital of Nationalist China, the Japanese quickly recognized that the events that night at the Marco Polo Bridge needed a stout response and immediately mobilized five divisions of the Guandong Army to begin pouring troops into the area. China’s Generalissimo Chiang Kaishek had been forcibly goaded into a so-called United Front with the Chinese Communists after the dramatic episode at Xian six months earlier, and he was now emboldened to meet Japanese aggression with Chinese force, declaring “the limits of endurance had been reached.”1 Japanese commanders anticipated a quick war, predicting that it would take only three months to subdue the Chinese; such thinking was wishful, considering it took sixteen months to reach some sort of strategic stalemate, with the war never ending on pro-Japanese terms.2 The war comprised two major fronts: one in the north that stretched west and south from the Tianjin-Beijing area, and the other in central China, spreading west and south from Shanghai. The Japanese path of advance was no secret, as it followed either the major rivers or railroads of China. Both the Yellow and Yangzi Rivers were followed inland for roughly five hundred miles, while the two key north-south railroads—the Tianjin-Nanjing and Beijing-Hankou lines—were captured and controlled by the Japanese to serve as their main arteries of internal supply. In addition, Japanese soldiers were better equipped and better led, and they won nearly every battle on their way to sealing off China’s coast, while also killing thousands of civilians along the way. The cost was high, though, as the Chinese bravely held for three months before retreating at Shanghai in the fall of 1937, winning a stunning victory at Tai’erzhuang the following spring.3 In the words of Edward Drea, the war had become a “meatgrinder ,” with the China Expeditionary Army (CEA) of the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) deploying some 700,000 troops to China in the first six months of the war, with twenty-three divisions in place by July 1938. This commitment was especially troublesome in light of the fact that Japan’s main strategic concern was the Soviet Union, with the IJA having only nine divisions deployed to Manchuria and Korea. Japanese casualties numbered 600,000 by December 1941—Chinese military and civilian deaths probably numbered in the millions—but still the CHAPTER 1 16 Nationalists did not capitulate, moving their capital to Chongqing, deep into the heart of western China. Japanese military strategy...