A Distant Mirror

By Howard G. Chua-Eoan

Deceit. Terror. The compulsion to perfect an impossible master plan. Nazi Germany's plunge into madness may have convulsed Europe, but Imperial Japan had set out on the same course eight years earlier in East Asia. The war there was already raging in September 1939, and no end was in sight.

On Sept. 18, 1931, a Japanese army lieutenant meticulously wired 42 cubes of yellow blasting powder and buried the load in the earth 5 ft. from railroad tracks north of the Manchurian city of Mukden (now Shenyang). The explosives would throw a lot of dirt but cause little damage to the rail line. After all, the South Manchurian Railroad was Japanese-owned and linked the empire's economic outposts in predominantly Chinese Manchuria. All the army wanted was an "incident."

At approximately 10:20 p.m., a plunger was depressed and the cache detonated. Soon after, a Japanese patrol checking the site reported that it had been fired upon by Chinese troops, even though the local warlord, an ally of China's Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, had kept his soldiers in their barracks to avoid clashes. At 11:30 p.m., Japan's Manchuria-based Kwantung army began attacking Chinese positions. By dawn they were joined by planes from the imperial colony of Korea. Quickly, Mukden was effectively under the empire's control. In the following months, the resource-rich region, more than thrice the size of prewar Poland, would be annexed. As for the railway, a train passing over the tracks 20 min. after the blast reported only a slight bump.

Actually, the Mukden Incident of 1931 was not the first time Japan's Kwantung army had tried to seize Manchuria. In 1928 the army assassinated the Chinese warlord who ruled the region in hopes of grabbing the territory outright. But the Japanese government squashed any further moves and hushed up the army's involvement in the killing. In 1931, Tokyo again tried to stop the army. But renegade officers arranged for a geisha to distract and delay the envoy sent by the central government. Overtaken by events and well aware that the Manchurian offensive had won acclaim for the militarist factions in Tokyo, the Japanese government caved in to the army's visions of manifest destiny -- and to its foolhardy insistence on heeding the lessons of World War I at any cost.

Though the empire found itself on the winning side in 1918, its military planners were deeply worried about the consequences of total war. They had witnessed the collapse of the Kaiser's formidable forces and knew that large navies and armies were no longer enough. A country had to be able to involve all its economic forces in a protracted war -- especially one against the Soviet Union, the foe Japan believed it was destined to battle for domination of northeast Asia. The military men knew that while the Japanese archipelago was woefully short of natural resources, neighboring territories were not. First Manchuria, then the rest of the old imperial Chinese realm became the focus of Japan's rush toward autarky. And that quest for security would lead deeper and deeper into war.

The fall of Manchuria was followed by the Fake War, an extended period of posturing by the Chinese and Japanese. But in January 1932, as the League of Nations debated Tokyo's aggression, a Japanese cruiser, four destroyers and two aircraft carriers anchored in the Yangtze River off the international city of Shanghai. They had come on the pretext of protecting Japanese citizens from attacks by Chinese mobs. In response, Nationalist forces moved into the Chinese suburb of Chapei and skirmished with patrolling Japanese marines. With his men giving way to the larger Chinese forces, Admiral Koichi Shiozawa ordered planes from his carriers to drop 30-lb. bombs over densely populated Chapei. It was the first wholesale air attack on civilian targets in history. Thousands of people, many of them women and children, were maimed and killed.

Condemned by the League, Japan quit the organization and found itself increasingly isolated. In its quest to prepare for a Soviet war, the empire continued to nibble at China and estranged itself from the U.S., Chiang's chief supporter and, embarrassingly for Tokyo, the source of most of Japan's strategic materials. National self-strengthening took on fanatical proportions. The state religion built around animist Shinto beliefs was transformed into full-fledged emperor worship. And despite shortages in food and electricity due to the military allocations, the Empire of the Rising Sun believed it was destined to shine over all of East Asia. "Manchuria alone is not enough," wrote navy Lieut. Commander Tota Ishimaru in 1936. "With it alone Japan cannot go on."

To buttress its military strategy, Japan forged ties with another international outcast -- Germany. In 1936 they signed a pact to oppose Communism that included secret protocols to come to the other's aid during a war with the Soviet Union. With Berlin balancing out Moscow, Tokyo accelerated its conquest of China with another "incident." On July 7, 1937, a Japanese soldier stationed near Beijing's Marco Polo Bridge left his post to urinate. His superiors announced that he had been abducted by a nearby Chinese garrison and began shelling the unit. Japanese forces soon overran eastern China.

Plans were then drawn to carry the battle up the Yangtze from Shanghai, take the Nationalist capital of Nanking (now Nanjing) and force Chiang to surrender. In one month the Imperial forces had shattered Chinese defenses, trapping 300,000 Nationalist troops and forcing hundreds of thousands of the city's 1 million people to flee. On Dec. 12, 1937, Nanking fell. For the next six weeks, the area's remaining population would be subjected to the worst atrocities yet seen in modern warfare. More than 200,000 men, a fourth of them civilians, were immolated, bayoneted or tortured to death, and 20,000 women were raped.

But the terror did not bring victory. Though forced to flee his capital, Chiang, in an uneasy alliance with Mao Zedong's Communist guerrillas, continued to resist from the southwestern hill city of Chungking (now Chongqing). The China Incident would drag on for years, sucking up much needed funds and prompting Japan to begin looking to Southeast Asia and the Pacific as alternative sources of material, which set it on a collision course with the U.S. The Imperial Navy's reckless attacks on neutral ships moored near Nanking during the siege (including the U.S. gunboat Panay, which sank with the loss of two American sailors), further isolated Japan from the West. Summing up his feelings about the Japanese, Colonel Joseph W. Stilwell, the U.S. military attache in Beijing, wrote in his diary in 1937, "The bastards."

In May 1939 the Kwantung army began another adventure, clashing with troops of the People's Republic of Mongolia, a client of Moscow's. Quickly, the Soviet Union sent assistance, and in the next four months the Japanese army lost 17,450 men to the vastly superior mechanized units of Soviet General Georgi Zhukov. But just when Japan could have used Berlin's help, Hitler announced a nonaggression pact between Berlin and Moscow.

Japan's leaders were furious, and for months the country's foreign policy wavered between an independent course and adherence to the alliance. When Berlin and Moscow swiftly began to carve up Poland on Sept. 1, Japan reacted coldly, simply stating, "The empire will not intervene in the war in Europe." Tokyo recalled its pro-German Ambassador to Berlin. A German- Japanese trade agreement scheduled to be signed in October 1939 was canceled, and Emperor Hirohito even announced that his country would "follow a conciliatory line with regard to Britain and America."

But Tokyo's Asian and Pacific ambitions prevented any detente with Washington. And soon, Germany's crushing victories in Europe were earning Berlin great prestige in Japan. By the time Paris fell in June 1940, slogans like "Don't miss the bus" were popular. In fact, immediately after signing the Soviet pact, German Foreign Minister Joachim von Ribbentrop was playing on Japanese anxieties, telling Tokyo's emissaries that turning away from Berlin and toward London and Washington would only hem in the empire. "The Western democracies," warned Ribbentrop, "would quickly form an extensive world coalition which would oppose any expansion by Japan and, in particular, would again wrest her from her position in China."

Won over by emotion and ambition, the country formed an ultra-nationalist Cabinet, and on Sept. 27, 1940, the fiery Foreign Minister Yosuke Matsuoka forged the Tripartite Agreement with Berlin and Rome, thus creating the Axis. "Japan," said Matsuoka, "should push boldly forward, hand in hand with Germany," not hesitating even to commit "double suicide" with Berlin if necessary. Warned that Japan's economy would collapse without severe cutbacks in the military budget, Army Minister Hideki Tojo, a former Kwantung commander who would become the empire's wartime Premier, was livid. Said he: "We simply have to sacrifice everything in the interest of strengthening our armed forces."

Almost alone among the upper military echelon, Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto counseled against being dragged further into war, especially against the U.S. In the first months of such a conflict, he said, "I will run wild and win victory upon victory. But then, if the war continues, I have no expectation of success." But by September 1941 a decision had been made to prepare to fight America, and as commander of the Imperial Navy, Yamamoto dutifully drew up the plans. "I expect to die on the deck of my flagship," he said. "In those evil days you will see Tokyo burnt to the ground three times."

By Nov. 26, 1941, Yamamoto's strike force of six aircraft carriers, two battleships and a host of cruisers, destroyers and submarines would set sail from Japan for the Kuriles, then deep into the Pacific toward Hawaii. Shortly after 6 a.m. on Dec. 7, dozens of Japanese Zeros would take off from the carriers, head south and within 90 minutes sight the coast of Oahu -- and Pearl Harbor. Japan, its fortunes yoked with Germany's, was launched on the road to double suicide.