Like the conflict in the oceans of the world, the war in Asia and the Pacific-or the Greater East Asia War, as the Japanese knew it-covered a vast range of operations. Japan did not possess a coherent military-expansionist policy that it pursued without wavering. Instead, there was not one war but several campaigns, opportunistically pursued in Manchuria, China, South-East Asia, and the Pacific Ocean. Allied responses to Japan’s expansion can be divided into the Central Pacific campaign, aimed at attacking Japan from the east, the south-west Pacific campaign attacking from the south and east, and the China-Burma-India campaign, attacking from the north and west.

 

The war in the Far East was a bitter and vicious war and second only to the war on the Eastern Front in Europe as far as civilian suffering was concerned. It was a war of attrition, guerrilla clashes, and punitive expeditions, in which the Japanese policy of ‘Three Alls’ (‘take all, burn all, kill all’) was pursued with ruthless efficiency. The war cost China 2 million military personnel dead and 1.7 million wounded. However, 15 million Chinese civilians also died between 1937 and 1945. Eighty-five per cent of them were peasants, killed mainly by starvation and exposure rather than by direct military action. Deaths were disproportionately high amongst women and female children. Not only did the conflict devastate the Chinese population and economy; it was decisive in a global context as well. After all, of the 2.3 million Japanese troops overseas, 1.2 million were tied down in China. Although often sidelined by Western historians of the Second World War, the war in China was at the heart of the ‘world war’. Japan’s Attack on China.

 

Initially, the Japanese were reluctant to go to war against China, but the resurgence of Chinese nationalism and a strengthening Chinese economy were seen as direct threats to Japanese influence in the region. The Japanese took action in 1931, when their troops occupied Manchuria, a border province of China, and turned it into a puppet state. This had wider implications than simply an attack upon Chinese sovereignty. The Japanese takeover of Manchuria directly threatened the interests of the Soviet Union. Would Japan turn its expansionist ambitions northward-to Siberia, for instance? It was strongly in the interest of the USSR to bolster Chinese resistance to the Japanese. Indeed, in the period prior to 1941, China had benefited from more military aid from the USSR than from the western Allies. Nevertheless, instead of expanding north, the Japanese moved south. By 1937, the conflict had spread to all of eastern China and the war had begun in earnest. Anti-Japanese feeling was exacerbated by the attack by the Japanese on Chinese soldiers and civilians at the Marco Polo Bridge, next to which was a vital railway line, in July 1937. Because of its strategic importance (it was only ten miles west of Beijing), Japanese troops in northern China had been conducting maneuvers in the area. However, on 7 July 1937, after a Japanese night maneuver during which the Chinese had fired some shells, a Japanese soldier went missing. In retaliation, the Japanese attacked and war commenced. This may rightly be designated the first battle of the Second World War.

 

By the end of July, Japanese soldiers had not only seized the bridge but taken control of the entire Tientsin-Peking region. The speed with which Japanese troops conquered parts of China was astounding. By 1938, Canton had ‘fallen’ and, despite notable military victories, including one in the town of Taierzhuang in southern Shantung, where 30,000 Japanese soldiers were killed by Nationalist Chinese troops, the Chinese were at a distinct disadvantage. The Japanese military was vastly superior. As late as 1940, China had only 150 military aircraft compared with the Japanese total of over 1,000. By the end of 1939, the whole of the north-eastern quarter of China was under Japanese occupation. Still, the Chinese did not surrender, forcing Japan to move still further inland, lengthening supply routes and stretching manpower to absolute limits. What followed was a war of attrition.

 

Chinese Resistance

 

The Japanese had hoped for a short war, but they under- estimated the tenacity of Chinese resistance. Protest by the Chinese against the Japanese invasion and against the weak response of the Nationalists to the Japanese encroachments began immediately after Manchuria had been occupied. It culminated in 1935 with the ‘December Ninth Movement’, during which tens of thousands of students protested in Tiananmen Square in Peking. Students were crucial to the resistance, moving into rural areas attempting to stimulate revolt. Thus, in 1936, the Peking-Tientsin Student Union produced leaflets written simply in the vernacular, encouraging revolt. These leaflets proclaimed: Men, women, children! Listen to what we say: have you seen those things flying overhead every day? Those things are called aeroplanes. Sitting in them are the devils of the Eastern sea, the Japanese devils. They speak in a foreign language, live in the Eastern sea, and fly their aeroplanes over here. Do you know what they are coming to do? . . . They are coming to kill every single man and woman with guns and knives, and to ravish our daughters and wives.

 

Exhortations like this were produced by resisters from all political persuasions-in particular, the Chinese Communist Party (the CCP) under Mao Zedong and the Kuomintang (the Nationalist Party, or KMT) under Chiang Kai-shek. These two parties had been vigorous enemies, but by 1937 Chiang was forced to give up his fight against the Communists in order to focus attention on defeating the Japanese. A truce was called and a ‘united front’ formed. This ‘united front’ was always fragile, but was crucial to the war and, in the end, to the fate of China itself.

 

Together, the Communists and Nationalists mobilized the Chinese population to resist the extraordinarily powerful Japanese military. Most persuasively, Mao argued that the only way to beat the Japanese was through guerrilla warfare. At some stage, he conceded, the Japanese army would have to be attacked head on, but he warned that premature engagement would be devastating. The guerrillas ensured that much of Japanese strength was employed protecting the railways (a central focus of guerrilla activity) and in ‘mopping up’ isolated guerrilla units. Attrition proved a successful strategy. The Japanese were seriously overstretched by mid-1938.

 

Nevertheless, in the early years of the war, large numbers of Chinese were collaborating with the Japanese and the puppet governments. As one peasant patiently explained: ‘The Japanese soldiers are coming and we only need to complete the harvest and pay taxes in the same way to live in peace as ordinary people.’ By 1938, however, Chinese resistance was massive, particularly amongst the Communists.

 

What led to this change?

 

Historians are split on how best to explain the success of the Chinese Communists in attracting support. Some argue that the skill with which the Chinese Communists led resistance to the Japanese made them popular. Particularly from 1941, the Communist-led guerrillas were scoring numerous victories over the Japanese. Japanese brutality meant that the peasants lauded these Communist victories. There is no question that terror was central to Japanese policy in China. As one Japanese regimental commander boasted: ‘Our policy has been to burn every enemy house along the way we advance. You can tell at a glance where our forward units are.’3 Chinese civilians who were not killed (and in some areas 40 per cent of the population died during the Japanese occupation) were made to perform slave labour or, if young men, forced to serve in the army of one of the puppet governments. Millions of refugees fled to areas still held by the CCP, placing further pressure on resources in Communist-held areas (by 1941 the Communists’ Eighth Route Army in the north was in charge of 44 million people).

 

Other historians argue that it was the CCP’s economic programme that brought it support. The peasants and poor suffered an unbearable reduction in their standard of living during the war. Between 1939 and February 1941, for instance, the price of a bushel of rice rose from 2.3 to 32 Chinese dollars. In despair, the poor turned to the Communists for succour. Mao was popular, and able to fuse the rhetoric of communist restructuring with that of nationalism. In other words, the Chinese Communists had a good reputation for attacking the Japanese, but they were also engaged in the struggle for a ‘people’s resistance’ and a peasant revolution. They supported the peasants in their struggle with the land- lords. The CCP’s policy of reducing rents gave the peasants something they considered well worth fighting for, thus encouraging participation in the resistance. Their slogan, ‘there must not be a single idle person, horse, or ox’, summed up the Communist campaign, particularly during harvest time.

 

These two explanations for the popularity of the Communists are not mutually exclusive. In reality, the reason for the growth of Communist resistance in China was most probably a combination of anti-Japanese feeling bolstered by economic promises. As Mao admitted: ‘Here [by resisting Japan] there is also a revolutionary movement, because the anti- Japanese struggle is accompanied by a struggle for democracy, better livelihood, and economic construction. Both go together in China. . . . It is also true that along this road the Chinese revolution gains.’

 

Or, as he reiterated just over a year later, the war was ‘being waged to drive out imperialism and transform the old China into a new China’. Support from the Western Allies The Chinese resisters did not have to fight alone. Admittedly, Stalin, Churchill, and Roosevelt had all agreed on a ‘Europe- first’ policy. Even dissenters from this policy placed victory in the Pacific higher than China’s tribulations. Churchill regarded resources sent to China as simply a diversion from India.

 

Nevertheless, the Chinese were given some help, partly because, in the longer term, China was seen as central to stability in Asia after the war. Only China could hold Japan in check-at least, this was what the Allies (particularly America) believed. In addition, although the other Powers had looked on while Japan invaded parts of China, when the Japanese turned to French Indo-China it became clear that American interests in the Philippines, British interests in Malaya and Singapore, and Dutch interests in the East Indies were threatened.

 

The Americans were the first of the western Allies to offer military aid. Even prior to the bombing of Pearl Harbor, they provided help through the same lend-lease scheme that had been so important for the British. Then, in July 1941, the USA imposed a financial and oil embargo on Japan, making America Japan’s most formidable enemy. After Pearl Harbor, American aid no longer had to be clandestine. Large loans of money were made, and the OSS provided weapons and training to Mao and Ho Chi Minh (leader of the Communist Party of French Indo-China, later known as Vietnam). Henceforth, the resistance forces were heavily dependent upon American aid, especially after 1941, when the Soviet Union was preoccupied with its own fight against Germany. If China was to be helped, severe logistical problems had to be solved. By 1941, the only way the western Allies could assist China directly was over the mountains through eastern India and north-east Burma. Yet, as we shall see in the next chapter, within hours of bombing Pearl Harbor on 7 December 1941, the Japanese had attacked British Malaya and Thailand, thus posing a direct threat to British Burma. Finally, in 1942, Burma was invaded by the Japanese, who needed to close the Burma Road, which was being used to provide supplies, including precious oil, to Chinese resistance. By early March 1942, the Japanese were in Rangoon, forcing the British, Indian, and Burmese units to retreat northwards into India, while Chinese divisions returned to China. That same month, the Japanese shut off the Burma Road, effectively isolating China from the outside world. The response of the Allies was twofold: find some way of keeping supplies flowing to the Chinese resisters while continuing to harass the Japanese through small-scale military operations. The first of these problems was ingeniously solved by employing British airbases in India to fly in weapons and other military supplies. These operations came to be termed ‘The Hump’, because planes flew over the Himalayan mountains. Between December 1942 and VJ Day, the Air Transport Command (one of the main groups trans- porting supplies) made more than 167,000 trips over ‘The Hump’, carrying 722,000 tons of supplies.