Mobilization at Home
Although Japan was not officially at war, its government and army relied on extensive propaganda and so-called spiritual mobilization to energize the home front and encourage popular support for the China effort. Parades, fireworks, and mass demonstrations celebrated the initial victories of 1937. Orchestrating these events, however, was risky as it had been during the Russo-Japanese War. In December 1937 the government organized a huge torchlight parade to celebrate the capture of Nanjing but had to postpone the celebration for three days when the Chinese capital did not fall as quickly as expected. In another effort to raise national morale and wartime consciousness, Hirohito opened the 74th Imperial Diet in December 1938 dressed in an army uniform bedecked with medals, not his traditional formal wear for the occasion. The escalating war in China, however, soon sapped the civilian economy and industry.25 The army’s share of the national budget had steadily increased since 1931 to pay for operations in Manchuria and North China. Waging a full-scale war in China since mid-1937, the accompanying army expansion, and the high command’s retooling of the force to fight the Soviet Union26 took more than 70 percent of the national budget.
Attempts to pass a national general mobilization law that would give the government sweeping economic powers encountered resistance in the Diet, where members heckled Lt. Col. Satō Kenryō, chief of the domestic affairs section of the military affairs branch, during his March 3, 1938, presentation. Exasperated that politicians had the temerity to contradict him, a furious Satō shouted “Shut up!” and stormed out of the room. The next day War Minister Sugiyama apologized for Satō’s behavior, but he did not reprimand the hot-headed colonel. In contrast, when a member of the opposition called on Konoe to show bolder leadership like Hitler, Mussolini, and Stalin, the Lower House promptly expelled him for the reference to the Soviet dictator. As for the mobilization legislation, Konoe ultimately conceded that its provisions would be applied only during an officially declared war and not the current incident.27
New Operations in China
Despite the mid-February decisions, aggressive Japanese commanders in North China sought out the enemy and routinely divided their forces to envelop and destroy the Chinese armies. In March 1938 two widely separated Japanese columns of the 5th Division moved from the north and the east against Taierzhuang, located on a rail line and transportation hub along the Grand Canal. Crack Guomindang troops defeated each column separately and forced the Japanese to retreat with heavy losses. Although Japanese reinforcements later drove out the seriously weakened Chinese, the Japanese defeat at Taierzhuang was celebrated across China as a major victory that greatly enhanced Chinese morale and further reduced the chances for downscaling field operations. The battle illustrated the dangers of overextended, smaller forces relying on aggressiveness and offensive spirit to defeat a larger, determined opponent.
On April 7, just as the fighting at Taierzhuang was drawing to a close, the IGHQ ordered a seven-division (200,000 troops) operation to envelop Xuzhou from north and south and trap at least fifty Guomindang (GMD) divisions.28 The army again split its forces and relied on converging columns to surround the Chinese. The two-month operation captured Xuzhou and destroyed scores of Chinese divisions but could not snare the main Chinese armies, most of which took advantage of a heavy fog and mist that blanketed the area to escape the encirclement. Japanese field logistics, already dangerously overextended, collapsed in the middle of the campaign, leaving frontline units hungry and precariously low on ammunition.
Unable to eliminate the GMD’s main armies, the general staff abandoned its strategy of decisive engagement in favor of occupying strategic points. They struck against Wuhan—an administrative center, a staging and logistic base for Chinese forces defending the central Yangzi region, and a rallying point for the defense of China in the summer of 1938. To forestall the Japanese thrust, in early June 1938 Chiang ordered the breaching of the Yellow River dikes at Huayuankou (Henan) in what Diana Lary has aptly labeled a “drowned earth” policy. The massive flooding isolated elements of two Japanese divisions, but 900,000 Chinese civilians perished in three badly flooded provinces, and 3.9 million more became refugees.29 Chiang’s decision prevented an immediate attack on Wuhan and allowed Chinese troops to retreat and regroup, but the IGHQ was more disquieted by the outbreak of regimental-size fighting in July and early August between Japanese and Soviet forces at Changkuofeng on the Korean-Soviet border. Uncertain whether the Soviets intended to enter the war on China’s side or were merely probing Japan’s defenses, the general staff suspended the Wuhan campaign.
After the Japanese takeover of Manchuria, Moscow had rapidly reinforced the Soviet Far East from eight divisions and 200 aircraft in 1932 to as many as twenty divisions and 1,200 aircraft just four years later. The possibility of spillover from the China war led to further reinforcements, and by 1938 there were an estimated twenty-four Soviet divisions (450,000 troops) and 2,000 aircraft in the region. The Japanese in turn had built up the Kwantung Army to eight divisions (about 200,000 personnel) with twelve air regiments (about 230 aircraft) plus an additional first-line division available in Korea for immediate reinforcement.30
Tension along the 3,000-mile unmarked and disputed border produced hundreds of minor incidents and a few major ones, such as the sinking of a Soviet gunboat on the Amur River near Blagoveshchensk in mid-1937. At that time, the Soviets had acceded to Japanese demands, which convinced the Kwantung Army that the Russians would invariably back down when confronted by military might. This certitude, along with intelligence reports that Stalin’s purges were ravaging the Red Army’s senior officer corps, appeared to render the Soviets a less formidable opponent.
When a small number of Soviet troops occupied the high ground near Changkuofeng in early July 1938, the Korea Army’s immediate reaction was to crush the intruders by force. Chief of Staff Prince Kan’in and War Minister Lt. Gen. Itagaki Seishirō separately sought imperial approval on July 20 for the attack, but their accounts contradicted the foreign minister’s version of events and so upset Hirohito that he insisted not a single soldier would move without his permission. Several days later, outposts reported that the Soviets were fortifying the heights near Changkuofeng, and the local Japanese commander unilaterally ordered a 1,500-man assault on the night of July 30/31 to retake the high ground. Assured that the officer had acted in self-defense after repeated Soviet provocations, Hirohito gave ex post facto approval the next day.31
But on August 1 Soviet aircraft bombed the Japanese positions, and at least three Soviet divisions, supported by tanks, aircraft, and heavy artillery, counterattacked the 7,000 or so Japanese defenders in the disputed area. For ten days the Soviets pounded the Japanese infantry, who were forbidden by the emperor and general staff to respond with aircraft or heavy artillery. Infantrymen grimly held their ground under relentless Soviet bombardment and sustained more than 1,400 casualties, including over 500 killed, although the war ministry’s official communiqué halved those figures for public consumption. Soviet losses were also considerable, somewhere between the officially announced 850 and 5,000 or 6,000. An August 11 cease-fire was signed in Moscow.
The cease-fire and Soviet restraint during the fighting, demonstrated by limiting their operations to the immediate contested area, reconfirmed the army’s impression that the Russians would back down when confronted by force. Staff officers derided the Red Army’s plodding tactics and its amateurish deployments during the fighting, views that meshed with confidential assessments of Soviet fighting ability, largely stereotypes predicated on presumed national characteristics.32 Lastly, the general staff was certain that the action at Changkuofeng had secured the army’s rear area bases in Manchuria.
With the threat to the northern flank neutralized, on August 22 the IGHQ ordered the Eleventh Army to resume the Wuhan offensive in conjunction with the Twenty-first Army’s amphibious assault against Guangzhou, a major port and supply base in southern China. The Eleventh Army
moved west on Wuhan along the Yangzi River, where the midsummer high-water levels made it navigable for navy gunboats to support infantrymen advancing along both banks of the great river. A separate attack drove south through the mountains to push in Chinese defenses. Altogether, 300,000 Japanese were pitted against one million Chinese troops.
Far from their depots and railheads, Japanese logistics quickly collapsed under the strain of overextended lines of communication, poor roads, and rugged mountainous terrain. Ill-supplied units operating along the banks of the Yangzi in stifling summer heat suffered epidemic malaria, amoebic dysentery, and outbreaks of cholera. Japanese troops ultimately resorted to poison gas, euphemistically known as “special smoke,” to break especially strong Chinese resistance. In south China, Guangzhou fell on October 21, and in central China Wuhan followed five days later, the culmination of a ten-month campaign that seriously weakened the Central Army but did not force its capitulation.33 To avoid a repetition of the Nanjing massacres, Chiang had ordered a general withdrawal before the Japanese reached Wuhan and relocated his capital at Chongqing in the remote interior of Sichuan (Szechwan).
The Wuhan battles marked the limit of the Japanese army’s offensive capability to conduct large-scale operations.34 By the fall of 1938 the war guidance section’s new policy depended on Chinese puppet regimes and collaborators to control occupied zones, exploit the resources of North China, and protect Japan’s economic and financial interests elsewhere in China. Consolidating control of the occupied areas would enable the army over time to reduce its 800,000 troops in China by half, although the remaining units would still hold key strategic areas as part of an anticommunist front formed by Japan, Manchukuo, and China. Prime Minister Konoe announced a benign version of the plan on November 3 when he described a new order in East Asia founded on an equal partnership between Japan and China.
The second imperial conference, held November 30, 1938, authorized the war guidance section’s new policy to perpetuate a divided China.35 The China Expeditionary Army strenuously objected to any troop reductions but ultimately agreed to reduce its forces to 750,000 by the end of 1939. Unable to end the China fighting and unwilling to support the army’s recurrent demands for domestic reforms, Konoe resigned in early January 1939.
Regardless of talk of consolidation, IGHQ directed further offensives in central China against Nanchang in March 1939. The Eleventh Army captured the city in late March and then held it against fierce but unsuccessful Chinese counterattacks during the next two months. In May the army launched punitive raids to disrupt newly established Chinese bases in mountainous northern Hubei, but just as they commenced, heavy fighting erupted between Japanese and Soviet forces at Nomonhan, a tiny village on the ill-defined Manchuria–Outer Mongolian border. IGHQ again had to suspend major ground combat in China.
The Nomonhan campaign was the culmination of more than thirty years of army preparations for war with Russia. Decades had been invested in doctrine formulation, tactical innovation, weapons technology, and rigorous training to win the decisive first battle by rapid encirclement and annihilation of the enemy. After the Changkuofeng battles, the Kwantung Army, relatively unscathed by the war in China, ordered local commanders to act aggressively against any Soviet or Outer Mongolian intrusions into disputed territory. Under these rules of engagement, in late May 1939 a reconnaissance unit from the 23d Division tracked down a handful of Outer Mongolian troops near the village of Nomonhan.
Attempting to pin the intruders between Nomonhan and the Khalkin River, about a dozen miles to the west, the commander’s aggressiveness led his unit into a Soviet ambush sprung by combined tank and infantry units. Soviet artillery, firing from the higher ground on the river’s west bank, pounded the encircled, heavily outnumbered, and badly outgunned Japanese. After losing more than 60 percent of their 200-man force, the Japanese escaped the encirclement at night, although their commander was killed during the breakout.
Stung by the repulse, the Kwantung Army headquarters committed a reinforced division to clear out the disputed zone. In early July the 23d Division executed an enveloping attack under the cover of darkness. Two tank regiments (seventy-three tanks total) attached to the division spearheaded a frontal assault to hold the Soviets in place while two infantry regiments crossed the Khalkin River north of the engagement and then drove southward, outflanking and destroying Soviet artillery on the high ground while enveloping the enemy forces trapped on the east side of the river.
The classic envelopment maneuver of closing on the enemy with cold steel ended in complete failure. The frontal assault ran headlong into dug-in Soviet infantry supported by antitank and field artillery units that inflicted severe losses on the pride of Japan’s armor corps, which was quickly withdrawn from the battle. Two days of heavy fighting stalled the flanking attack along the west bank, and Soviet counterattacks by hundreds of tanks and armored cars threatened to overrun the exposed Japanese, who depended on a single bridge for supplies and reinforcements because all other army bridging equipment had been previously committed to China operations.36 Japanese infantrymen fought desperately in their shrinking bridgehead but on July 5 finally withdrew across the river, where they dug in under the sights of the Soviet gunners who dominated the higher ground on the west bank.
A protracted battle of attrition ensued as both sides reinforced, probed, and exchanged artillery bombardments for the next three weeks. The Soviets stopped a major Japanese frontal assault on July 23–25 short of its objective, a bridge at the confluence of the Khalkin and Holsten rivers. Afterward a dreary stalemate gripped the combatants until August 20, when the Red Army commanded by Lt. Gen. Georgi Zhukov unleashed a double-envelopment spearheaded by armor and mechanized brigades that turned the 23d Division’s northern and southern flanks, surrounded the division, and then destroyed it. Japanese losses were more than 17,000, about half killed in action; Soviet casualties perhaps reached 20,000. In the midst of Zhukov’s offensive, with the 23d Division literally fighting for its life, Japan’s reputed ally Nazi Germany concluded a nonaggression pact with the Soviet Union. This dramatic turnabout caused the fall of the cabinet in Tokyo and consternation throughout the army.
Nazi armies rolled across the Polish frontier on September 1 secure in a secret protocol that divided the hapless nation with the Soviets. Some Japanese officers reckoned that the outbreak of war in Europe would compel the Soviets to withdraw units from Siberia to western Russia to deal with the crisis. Hotheads on the Kwantung Army staff urged an immediate three-division counterattack to retrieve the Nomonhan situation. Instead, on September 3 the general staff issued an imperial order canceling offensive operations and accepted defeat.
The Nomonhan disaster was all the more traumatic because the army had employed its premier doctrine, tactics, and equipment that it specially designed to produce a lightning victory. Instead, everything from nighttime bayonet assaults to vaunted spiritual power had failed. Rather than admit the full implications of the disaster, the high command blamed the troops of the recently activated 23d Division (July 1938) and their incompetent officers for the debacle. Subsequent army investigatory committees concluded that fighting spirit still retained its absolute priority in battle, although more firepower might be necessary in future engagements.37
Personnel reassignments followed the defeat. Senior commanders and high-level staff officers were seconded to the reserves or posted to army training schools. Regimental officers who actually fought in the battles were branded cowards or pressured to commit suicide for unauthorized withdrawals, in two cases after extended and heroic defense of their isolated positions. The army also dealt harshly with the 159 repatriated Japanese prisoners of war.38
The first prisoner exchanges occurred on September 27. Three days later the war minister ordered the commanders of the Kwantung Army and the China Expeditionary Army to interrogate all returning POWs and take required disciplinary measures, including assignment to penal units. The minister’s objective was to t
ighten army discipline, but the Kwantung Army ordered disciplinary punishment even for those not indicted by review boards. Though regulations did not officially forbid surrender, the army’s informal culture and the hothouse patriotism in Japan stigmatized those taken captive.
Repatriated officers were encouraged, or ordered, to commit suicide. Two repatriated army air force officers captured when their planes were shot down far behind enemy lines were allegedly handed pistols and told to do the honorable thing. Enlisted ex-prisoners of war were segregated for interrogation and subsequent courts-martial. Punishments ranged from several years’ confinement to a few days under house arrest. After serving their sentences, former POWs were relocated outside of Japan at locations of the former prisoners’ choosing. None was allowed to return to his parent unit, and even after being discharged from the army only a handful returned home to Japan.39
If Major Kuga’s troubled suicide in 1932 outside Shanghai set the standard for officers to seek death before surrender, then the harsh treatment of returned enlisted prisoners sent that message throughout the army. It was another example of senior officers blaming the high command’s mistakes on the rank-and-file’s lack of fighting spirit.
The Occupied Zones
Army officials took little interest in long-term occupation policies, and logistics were so strained that imperial headquarters ordered its field armies to live off the land, an open invitation to widespread looting and pillaging. Roving Japanese and Chinese armies foraging for food repeatedly stripped contested areas of crops, livestock, and valuables. Banditry replaced local administration, and widespread crime characterized entire sections of occupied China throughout the war.
Field brothels became a feature of the occupying army. Civilian and military authorities had established a brothel system in Shanghai during 1932 to prevent the spread of sexually transmitted diseases among troops. After the outbreak of full-scale war with China in 1937, however, instances of Japanese troops assaulting, raping, or murdering Chinese women significantly increased, and commanders sought to restore military discipline by establishing field brothels, the so-called comfort stations, in the Japanese-occupied zones. In other words, the health, welfare, and discipline of the troops motivated the army.
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