(5) SINO-JAPANESE WAR

(18 SEPTEMBER 1931 – 27 FEBRUARY 1932 / 7 JULY 1937 – 2 SEPTEMBER 1945)

This is the other big one but in reverse to the Anglo-German war – the war no one thinks or talks about for the Second World War, despite its scale, not least reflected in Chinese casualties second only to the Soviets

That omission or oversight in popular culture or consciousness is reflected in the usual historiography of the Second World War commencing with the German invasion of Poland, rather than the Japanese war with China that commenced two years earlier – or arguably six years before that with the Japanese invasion of Manchuria.

Well, for Europeans or Eurocentric history at least – it obviously gets more attention in Asian history. More accurately, it was the Second Sino-Japanese War, after the First Sino-Japanese war fought between Qing China and Japan in 1894-1895.

In fairness, it was largely isolated to the combatant nations of China and Japan. The actual combat was isolated to China itself, given that the Chinese forces involved could barely defend themselves or their territory. By barely I mean with extensive losses and limited longer term prospects of continuing to do so without outside aid or intervention, let alone any prospects of ejecting Japanese forces or taking the war to Japan. And of course, isolated is a relative term, given the scale of war with China as the world’s most populous nation and one of its largest in size.

I say largely isolated because there were various degrees of foreign involvement in support to China or on the edges of the war itself. The former surprisingly included aid from Germany at the outset, until Germany aligned itself with Japan and started its own war in Europe – prompting much of the foreign involvement on the edges of the war with Japan seeking to cut off routes of supply to China or resources for its own war effort in south-east Asia, ultimately leading to the larger Pacific War.

Also in fairness, the war received reasonably widespread attention at the outset, both for the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and for the Japanese war with China from 1937, the latter most infamously for the R*pe of Nanking or Nanjing, the Chinese southern capital that the Chinese Nationalist government could not defend and had to abandon.

I am only familiar with the basic highlights of the war until the European war in 1939 – the loss of Nanjing of course and the loss of Shanghai that preceded it, the Chinese Nationalist regime under Chiang Kai-shek deciding to blow up the dams of the Yellow River to flood the North China plain to slow the Japanese advance in 1938, and the Chinese government having to retreat first to Wuhan and second to Chungking as its capital.

Looking it up, the battle of Wuhan in 1938 was the largest battle of the war – Wuhan was lost but China managed to hold the city of Changsha through two battles in 1939 and 1941, as well as win victory at Taierzhuang in 1938. In fairness to myself, the major combat operations in this period of the war from 1938 to 1941 are usually not common knowledge.

And in fairness to world attention at the time, the Sino-Japanese war was not only overshadowed by the war in Europe, but also largely settled into stalemate – where Japan had mostly defeated Chinese forces in battle but lacked the forces to extend its occupation further beyond coastal cities or railways in a country that remained overwhelmingly hostile to it. At the same, Chinese forces lacked the ability for anything other than a defensive strategy – that is, avoiding open battle as much as possible while looking for salvation from outside forces, with the Nationalists and Communists also looking ahead to renewed civil war with each other.

However, Japan still had one surprise left for China, even while it was virtually collapsing in the Pacific War against the United States, and one that is almost entirely forgotten or overlooked in most Second World War histories – the Ichigo offensive in 1944. The largest Japanese army offensive of the whole war, it was also the last successful Japanese offensive – astonishingly so and on a scale unequalled for anything else by Japan or Germany at the time.

It was the last of a series of Japanese blows that ultimately proved fatal for the Chinese Nationalist government in the subsequent civil war with the Communists – Japan arguably doing the most of anyone, including the Chinese Communists themselves, to win victory for the Communists in the civil war.

RATING: 4 STARS****

A-TIER (TOP TIER)