The Japanese invasion of Manchuria

The Japanese invasion of Manchuria was the first war of conquest of the 1930s and the first great act of aggression to which the world proved unable to respond. It began on the evening of 18 September 1931, when officers of Japan’s Kwantung Army set off a small charge on the tracks of the South Manchuria Railway near Mukden (Shenyang), blamed Chinese soldiers for it and attacked their barracks that same night. Within five months an army that at the outset numbered little more than ten thousand men had occupied an area larger than France and Germany combined. It acted on its own initiative: the government in Tokyo proclaimed a policy of not widening the conflict, and the General Staff repeatedly halted its advance, yet every fait accompli was afterwards endorsed. China’s ruler in Manchuria, Marshal Zhang Xueliang, ordered his troops not to resist; the government of Chiang Kai-shek placed its trust in the League of Nations; and the League confined itself to resolutions and the dispatch of a commission. Only a few fought, such as General Ma Zhanshan on the Nen River and the defenders of Harbin. On 1 March 1932 the Japanese proclaimed the state of Manchukuo on the conquered lands and placed at its head the last emperor of China, Puyi.

Name and dates

In Japan these events were, and still are, called the “Manchurian incident” (Manshū jihen). The word “incident” was a political choice: Japan did not declare war on China so as not to stand as the aggressor under the Kellogg–Briand Pact and expose itself to sanctions, and the two sides maintained diplomatic relations throughout. In China people speak of the “18 September incident” (Jiu yi ba), a name that covers both the explosion on the tracks and the whole invasion. The explosion itself is known to the Chinese as the Liutiao Lake incident (Liutiaohu), after the place where it was staged. In English the provocation is generally called the Mukden incident and the campaign the invasion of Manchuria.

The campaign is taken to have begun on 18 September 1931, the day of the explosion and the first attack on the Chinese barracks. Its end is a matter of convention. The last large Chinese garrison of regular troops, at Harbin, was routed on 5 February 1932 (some sources give 4 February, when the Japanese approached the city and the battle began). The end date is usually given as 27 February 1932, which many Western studies and war chronologies link to a proposal to cease fighting made by General Ding Chao, the commander of Harbin’s defence. It should be remembered, however, that Ding Chao, having withdrawn down the Sungari, went on fighting for many months; that General Ma Zhanshan, who in February ostensibly went over to the Japanese, took up arms again in April 1932; and that fighting with Chinese volunteer armies and partisans continued in Manchuria for several more years. Japan, which never called the campaign a war, regarded it as over only with the Tanggu Truce of 31 May 1933, after the occupation of Rehe province.

Background

Japanese Manchuria. After the Russo-Japanese War Japan took over from Russia the lease of the Kwantung Territory at the southern tip of the Liaodong Peninsula, with Port Arthur (Lüshun) and Dalian, together with the southern branch of the Chinese Eastern Railway from Changchun to Port Arthur. Under the Treaty of Portsmouth and an agreement with China of December 1905, the Japanese were entitled to station troops along the railway, up to fifteen soldiers per kilometre of track. The South Manchuria Railway, a huge state-owned company known as Mantetsu, administered a strip of land along the line with schools, mines, steelworks and urban districts, including a modern Japanese quarter of Mukden. In 1915, in the so-called Twenty-One Demands, Japan forced an extension of the lease to 99 years. In 1919 the troops guarding the leased territory and the railway were made into a separate Kwantung Army, answerable directly to Tokyo. By the end of the 1920s some two hundred thousand Japanese and more than half a million Koreans, who were Japanese subjects, lived in Manchuria, and a substantial share of Japan’s foreign investment was concentrated in the region.

The Young Marshal and Chinese nationalism. For twelve years Manchuria was ruled by the warlord Zhang Zuolin, with whom Japan cooperated, if with growing reluctance. When Zhang stopped doing as he was told, officers of the Kwantung Army under Colonel Daisaku Kōmoto assassinated him on 4 June 1928. His son and successor, Zhang Xueliang, refused to be intimidated, however. In December 1928 he placed Manchuria under the Kuomintang’s National Government in Nanjing and then set about pushing back Japanese influence: he built Chinese railway lines to compete with Mantetsu and a port at Huludao intended to draw traffic away from Dalian, and he made it difficult for Japanese and Koreans to lease land. The Japanese public heard of hundreds of “unresolved Manchurian questions” and of the threat to Japan’s “lifeline”, as the politician Yōsuke Matsuoka called Manchuria. The Great Depression, which after the Wall Street Crash hit Japanese silk exports and the countryside, made Manchuria, rich in coal, iron and farmland, look to many Japanese like salvation.

The conspiracy in the Kwantung Army staff. On the staff of the Kwantung Army at Port Arthur, two officers concluded that the diplomacy of Foreign Minister Kijūrō Shidehara, founded on cooperation with the powers and non-interference in China’s affairs, would lead to the loss of Manchuria. Lieutenant Colonel Kanji Ishiwara, head of the operations section, was the theorist of a future “final war” between Japan and the United States, for which Japan would need Manchuria’s resources. Colonel Seishirō Itagaki, the senior staff officer, was the organiser and the man with the connections. From 1929 they drew up operational plans for the seizure of Manchuria, and in the spring of 1931 a plan for a provocation. They had allies in Tokyo, among officers of the General Staff and in the secret Sakurakai (Cherry Blossom Society), which was plotting a coup in Japan itself. Two events in the summer of 1931 inflamed the atmosphere: a clash between Chinese peasants and Korean settlers at Wanbaoshan near Changchun in July, which set off anti-Chinese pogroms in Korea, and the killing by Chinese soldiers of a Japanese intelligence officer, Captain Shintarō Nakamura, which came to light in August.

At the beginning of August 1931 command of the Kwantung Army passed to Lieutenant General Shigeru Honjō, a former adviser to Zhang Zuolin. Rumours of the preparations reached Tokyo. The War Minister, General Jirō Minami, also warned by diplomats, sent General Yoshitsugu Tatekawa to Mukden with instructions to restrain the conspirators. Tatekawa, himself sympathetic to them, was in no hurry. When he reached Mukden on the evening of 18 September, Itagaki took him to a restaurant, and the conspirators decided to act that very night, before the order from Tokyo could be formally delivered.

Forces. In September 1931 the Kwantung Army numbered a little over ten thousand men: General Jirō Tamon’s 2nd Division, whose regiments were stationed along the railway, and six independent railway guard battalions. Across the border in Korea stood General Senjūrō Hayashi’s Korea Army, ready to come to its aid. Zhang Xueliang’s North-Eastern Army was on paper one of the strongest in China: in all it numbered some quarter of a million men and had an arsenal at Mukden, tanks, several dozen combat aircraft and heavy artillery. Its best units, however, more than a hundred thousand men in all, had since the autumn of 1930 been stationed south of the Great Wall, in Hebei province, where Zhang had led them to support Chiang Kai-shek in the civil war against Yan Xishan and Feng Yuxiang. Zhang himself had resided in Beijing (then Peiping) ever since, and at the time of the incident he was there recovering from typhoid. The forces left behind in Manchuria – from about 160,000 to over 200,000 men, according to various estimates – were scattered across three provinces, poorly trained and penetrated by Japanese intelligence.

Course of the campaign

The night of 18 September: Mukden

At about 10.20 p.m. Lieutenant Suemori Kawamoto of a railway guard battalion detonated a charge beside the South Manchuria Railway track a few kilometres north of Mukden, near the small Liutiao Lake and a few hundred metres from Beidaying, the North Barracks, which housed the Chinese 7th Brigade, some seven thousand men. The explosion was weak: it damaged a stretch of a single rail about a metre and a half long, and a train from Changchun passed over the spot a few minutes later without difficulty. The Japanese at once announced that Chinese soldiers had blown up the track and fired on a patrol. Companies of Major Shimamoto’s battalion moved against Beidaying, and two heavy 240 mm howitzers, secretly emplaced a few weeks earlier within the Japanese garrison compound in Mukden, opened fire on the barracks and the Chinese airfield. Itagaki, who was issuing orders in Mukden in the name of his absent commander, also ordered the 29th Infantry Regiment to attack the walled Chinese city.

The Chinese soldiers were under orders not to respond to provocations: Zhang Xueliang, fearing that the Japanese were looking for a pretext, had since the summer ordered clashes to be avoided, and when the shooting started the commanders in Mukden were instructed not to resist and to place their weapons in storage. Some units defended themselves nonetheless, but most withdrew eastwards from the barracks. By morning the Japanese had taken Beidaying, the Chinese city, the arsenal and the airfield with its several dozen aircraft. Two Japanese were killed and, according to various sources, between about three hundred and five hundred Chinese.

General Honjō was at Port Arthur that evening. When the reports reached him before midnight, he hesitated for several hours over whether to widen the operation. According to his staff officers, it was Ishiwara who persuaded him. Honjō ordered the seizure of the main towns along the railway, moved his headquarters to Mukden and asked the Korea Army for reinforcements. On 19 September the Japanese took Changchun (after heavy fighting at Nanling and Kuanchengzi, where the Chinese put up stiff resistance), Yingkou, Liaoyang, Fushun, Andong (Dandong) on the Korean border and several other towns. Within a single day the entire railway zone and its surroundings were in Japanese hands.

Tokyo and the fait accompli

The government of Prime Minister Reijirō Wakatsuki learned of the events from newspapers and telegrams. At a cabinet meeting on 19 September, Foreign Minister Shidehara, who had information from diplomats in Mukden that the incident was the army’s own work, secured a decision not to widen the conflict. The Chief of the General Staff and the War Minister passed it on to the Kwantung Army. The army, however, found a new pretext: an alleged threat to the Japanese in Jilin, the capital of the neighbouring province, which lay outside the railway zone. On 21 September its troops entered the city, surrendered to them without a fight by the provincial chief of staff, General Xi Qia, who soon became head of a pro-Japanese government of Jilin.

On the same day something happened that under the Japanese system was a crime: General Hayashi, commander of the Korea Army, on his own initiative and without an imperial order, sent the 39th Mixed Brigade across the Yalu, the border river. Sending troops abroad without the emperor’s sanction violated his prerogative of command. The government wavered for two days, but on 22 September Prime Minister Wakatsuki decided that since the troops had already crossed the border, they could not be denied funds, and the cabinet approved the expenditure. Emperor Hirohito consented after the fact, while making his displeasure plain to the generals. This was a pattern that would repeat itself throughout the campaign: the army acted, the government protested, and then it accepted the fait accompli. At the turn of September and October, with Japanese help, pro-Japanese “committees” and governments were set up in Mukden, Jilin and Harbin, while in the west General Zhang Haipeng at Taonan declared his district independent in exchange for Japanese arms.

The bombing of Jinzhou

Zhang Xueliang moved the Liaoning provincial authorities to Jinzhou, a railway junction on the Beijing–Mukden line close to the passage from Manchuria into China proper. Ishiwara decided that it had to be shown that Zhang had no business in Manchuria. On 8 October 1931 twelve Japanese aircraft, including French-built Potez bombers captured from the Chinese, dropped several dozen bombs on the town, aiming at the seat of government and the barracks. Soldiers and civilians were killed. It was one of the first air raids on a city since the First World War, and it provoked a wave of outrage in Europe and America. The reports from Jinzhou changed the attitude of the US Secretary of State, Henry Stimson, who had previously counted on the Japanese government to rein in the army itself.

The League of Nations, to which China had appealed as early as 21 September, adopted a resolution on 30 September taking note of Japan’s assurance that its troops would return to the railway zone as soon as the safety of Japanese nationals was guaranteed. On 24 October the League Council, by 13 votes to 1, with Japan voting against, called on Japan to withdraw its troops by 16 November. Since the Council’s decisions required unanimity including the parties to the dispute, the resolution was not binding. Meanwhile, in mid-October, officers of the Sakurakai who had been preparing to assassinate members of the government were arrested in Tokyo (the so-called October incident). They were punished leniently, and politicians understood that opposing the army could cost them their lives.

The Nen River bridge and Qiqihar

The northernmost province was Heilongjiang, crossed by the Chinese Eastern Railway, half-owned by the USSR. Here the Japanese moved more cautiously, because the General Staff feared war with Russia. In mid-October Zhang Haipeng, with their backing, advanced on the provincial capital, Qiqihar. The provincial forces drove him back and, to halt his advance, blew up the railway bridge over the Nen River, on a line built with Japanese loans. Zhang Xueliang meanwhile appointed as acting governor of the province General Ma Zhanshan, a former cavalry commander, who took office in Qiqihar on 20 October and declared that he would “never be a general who surrendered”.

The Kwantung Army demanded that the bridge be repaired. On 4 November it sent a repair party under the cover of several hundred soldiers. Fighting broke out with Ma’s units, which had taken up positions along the river. Each side accused the other of opening fire. Over the following days Ma counter-attacked while the Japanese brought up reinforcements, tanks and aircraft. According to reports at the time, by 15 November his units had lost more than four hundred killed and about three hundred wounded. Ma rejected an ultimatum demanding the surrender of Qiqihar. On 17 November, in freezing cold, about 3,500 Japanese of General Tamon’s 2nd Division attacked his positions at Sanjianfang, south of the city, and broke through with the support of artillery and aircraft. On 18 November Ma abandoned Qiqihar and withdrew north-east to Hailun, and on 19 November the Japanese entered the city. Tokyo, which still forbade the occupation of northern Manchuria, ordered the main forces withdrawn, and Honjō, against the wishes of his staff officers, left only a small garrison in Qiqihar.

The fighting on the Nen was a military defeat but of enormous political importance. Ma Zhanshan, the only general to defy the policy of non-resistance, became a national hero. Newspapers all over the world wrote about him, the Chinese diaspora in America sent him money, and his example inspired thousands to join the volunteer armies that in the years that followed fought the Japanese throughout Manchuria.

Puyi leaves Tianjin

The Kwantung Army had no intention of annexing Manchuria. Ishiwara’s plan, which had originally envisaged incorporating it into Japan, gave way to the idea of an “independent” state ruled by Chinese and Manchus under Japanese control. All it lacked was a head. Colonel Kenji Doihara, head of Japanese intelligence in Mukden and later in Harbin, travelled to Tianjin, where Puyi, the emperor deposed in 1912, was living in the Japanese concession, and promised him a throne. On 8 November the Japanese stirred up riots in Tianjin, and in the confusion, on 10 November, Puyi secretly left the city and sailed on a Japanese ship to Yingkou and then to Port Arthur. A second round of riots in Tianjin, on 26 November, served the Kwantung Army as a pretext to move on Jinzhou, but on 27 November an imperial order issued by the Chief of the General Staff told it to pull back east of the Liao River. Tokyo still hoped for a compromise: the League of Nations was considering a neutral zone around Jinzhou, which Chiang Kai-shek had first proposed and then, on 4 December, under pressure from an outraged public, withdrew.

The fall of Jinzhou

December changed the balance of power in both capitals. On 10 December the League Council decided to send a commission to the Far East under the British politician Victor Bulwer-Lytton to investigate the matter on the spot. Japan agreed on condition that this would not interrupt “operations against bandits”, which gave the Kwantung Army a free hand. On 11 December the Wakatsuki government, torn apart by internal disputes, fell, and the new prime minister, Tsuyoshi Inukai, leader of the Seiyūkai party, agreed to the march on Jinzhou and to the dispatch of further divisions to Manchuria. By the end of December Japanese forces in Manchuria already numbered about sixty thousand men. In Nanjing, meanwhile, Chiang Kai-shek, accused by his Canton rivals of giving up Manchuria, stepped down as head of government on 15 December.

At the end of December the Japanese advanced westwards from Mukden along the railway. Zhang Xueliang, deprived of support from the new and weak government in Nanjing and convinced that he could not hold the town, withdrew his troops behind the Great Wall. On 3 January 1932 the Japanese entered Jinzhou without a fight, and they soon stood before Shanhaiguan, where the Great Wall meets the sea. Four days later, on 7 January, Stimson announced in notes to China and Japan that the United States would not recognise any situation, treaty or agreement brought about by means contrary to the Kellogg–Briand Pact. This Stimson Doctrine was a moral condemnation, but it carried no sanctions.

The battle for Harbin

The last major city outside Japanese control was Harbin, the hub of the Chinese Eastern Railway, with a large Russian community. It was defended by General Ding Chao, commander of the railway guard, together with General Li Du. At the end of January 1932 Xi Qia’s pro-Japanese “new Jilin army” advanced on the city, but on 26 January it was beaten by Ding. Doihara then stirred up riots in Harbin in which several Japanese subjects were killed, and this gave the Kwantung Army a pretext to intervene. Tamon’s 2nd Division, which had been resting in Mukden after the Jinzhou operation, boarded trains on 28 January, the day fighting between Japan and China began in Shanghai. For a week its columns forced their way across the snow-covered steppe in temperatures falling to minus thirty degrees. The Japanese used the Chinese Eastern Railway to move their troops despite the objections of its Soviet management, and Moscow, still weak in the Far East, confined itself to protests.

On 4 February the Japanese approached the city from the west and south. Ding’s defenders, many of them poorly armed volunteers, fought for more than ten hours under artillery fire and air attack. On 5 February they broke and withdrew down the Sungari, and the Japanese occupied Harbin. With it fell the last centre of organised resistance by regular Chinese troops in Manchuria.

February 1932: the end of the campaign

After the fall of Harbin, Doihara brought to terms Ma Zhanshan, who had been holding out at Hailun since November and conducting ambiguous talks with the Japanese. In mid-February Ma agreed to cooperate with the new regime in return for keeping his post as governor of Heilongjiang and, according to various accounts, large sums in gold. On 16 February the collaborating governors and generals met in Mukden and formed the North-Eastern Administrative Council, and on 18 February they declared Manchuria’s separation from the Republic of China. On 27 February, according to Western studies, Ding Chao proposed a cessation of hostilities. On 29 February an assembly in Mukden asked Puyi to assume power, and on 1 March 1932 Manchukuo was proclaimed; Puyi became its “Chief Executive” on 9 March.

Losses

There is no reliable tally of losses for the campaign as a whole, and the figures available concern individual engagements. In the night fighting for Mukden two Japanese were killed and, according to various sources, between about three hundred and five hundred Chinese. Ma Zhanshan’s units lost more than four hundred killed and about three hundred wounded in the fighting on the Nen between 5 and 15 November 1931, and more men later at Qiqihar. The defenders of Harbin, many of them volunteers, also suffered heavy losses. Japanese losses were many times smaller, because most of the Chinese forces did not resist, but the fighting on the Nen, at Qiqihar and at Harbin cost the Japanese dozens killed and many cases of frostbite. Civilians died too, among other places in the bombing of Jinzhou and in the fighting for Harbin. Far heavier losses, running to tens of thousands killed, came in the following years of fighting against the volunteer armies and partisans, and from Japanese reprisals against the population, such as the Pingdingshan massacre of September 1932.

China’s political losses were immense. It lost an area of more than a million square kilometres with some thirty million inhabitants – the most industrialised region of the country, with the coal mines of Fushun, the steelworks of Anshan and the Mukden arsenal, which fell into Japanese hands with its entire stock of weapons. Hundreds of thousands of people fled Manchuria, among them, in the summer of 1932, some hundred thousand students who did not wish to live under Japanese rule.

Significance

The invasion of Manchuria was the first great breach in the order created after the First World War. Japan – a permanent member of the League of Nations Council and a signatory both of the Washington agreements of 1922, which guaranteed China’s territorial integrity, and of the Kellogg–Briand Pact – seized part of another League member’s territory by force, and the League was unable to stop it. The Lytton Commission’s report, published in October 1932, recognised Manchuria as part of China and Manchukuo as a creation of the Japanese army, but when the League Assembly adopted its conclusions in February 1933, Japan simply walked out of the League. No one imposed sanctions on it, because Britain and France, sunk in the Depression, did not want a war in the Far East, and the United States was not a member of the League. Benito Mussolini and Adolf Hitler drew their own conclusions: in 1935 Italy invaded Ethiopia, and in 1936 Germany marched into the Rhineland. For this reason many historians regard 18 September 1931 as the beginning of the Second World War in Asia, and since 2017 China has officially dated the fourteen-year War of Resistance against Japan from that day.

In Japan itself the campaign marked the beginning of the end of civilian control over the military. The Kwantung Army learned that it could break orders and be rewarded for it: Honjō returned home a hero and became the emperor’s Chief Aide-de-Camp, Itagaki and Ishiwara made careers, and Hayashi, who had crossed the border without orders, became War Minister and later Prime Minister. Public opinion, fed war fever by the newspapers, enthusiastically supported the conquest. Prime Minister Inukai, who tried to negotiate with China and was in no hurry to recognise Manchukuo, was killed on 15 May 1932 by young naval officers. Within a few years the last party governments gave way to cabinets dominated by the military.

Manchuria became Japan’s industrial base and training ground. From there the Kwantung Army reached out for Rehe province in 1933 and threatened Beijing; from there in 1937 the Japanese army advanced into northern China; and on its borders in 1938 and 1939 there was fighting with the Red Army at Lake Khasan and on the Khalkhin Gol. For China the loss of Manchuria was a blow that dominated its politics for years. The policy of non-resistance, for which Zhang Xueliang paid with his reputation, and Chiang Kai-shek’s principle of “first internal pacification, then external resistance” became a source of deep anger that in December 1936 led to Chiang’s detention in Xi’an by none other than Zhang Xueliang, and in July 1937 to a war that in 1941 became part of the world war.