The Spectre of War: International Communism and the Origins of World War II by Jonathan Haslam

Author:Jonathan Haslam [Haslam, Jonathan]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780691182650
Google: xZIIEAAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0691182655
Published: 2021-05-25T00:00:00+00:00

The Marco Polo Bridge Incident: War

Unlike in the Manchurian crisis of 1931, the shooting incident that occurred on 8 July 1937 on Marco Polo Bridge (Lukouchiao) ten miles west of Beijing and gave rise to fighting between Chinese and Japanese troops is believed to have been spontaneous. The American naval attaché in Tokyo, however, reported, “Many circumstances point to the fact that the present trouble in North China was either instigated by the Japanese or that they are using the incidents to further their aims and ambitions in that area.”16 Certainly the Japanese reacted aggressively after the incident by launching a major campaign from their base in occupied Manchuria to conquer the whole of northern China—under General Doihara, the provinces of Jehol, Hopei and Chahar had already been incorporated into a buffer zone through a blend of terror and cajolery. Even before the “incident”, General Isogai, chief of the military affairs bureau of the Japanese War Ministry, had warned the British that “Japan was not antagonistic towards the Nanking [Nanjing] government but was sceptical over its real attitude towards the suppression of communism”. More specifically, “[w]hile the Nanking government’s attitude with regard to the special relations between Japan, Manchukuo and north China, to the control of anti-Japanese activities and the suppression of communism remained unsatisfactory, the Japanese government could not remain indifferent.”17

The inflation of nomenclature tells all. “Incident” in Japanese is jihen, which means a conflict short of war. At the outset the Japanese called the shooting at Marco Polo Bridge the “Lukouchiao Incident”. This was subsequently and tellingly renamed the “North China Incident”; then the “Sino–Japanese Incident”; and, finally, the “China Incident”, as the Japanese relentlessly expanded their military offensive and took advantage of events.18 Indeed, on 17 August the Japanese cabinet accepted that this was a war in all but name and reversed the policy of not extending the conflict.19 Hitherto Japanese aggression could be seen as “local”. But this now turned out to be something entirely different in scale. The first question was how the Chinese would react. The second question was how the British and the Americans would respond.

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