The defence of the Great Wall begins

On the evening of 1 January 1933 several grenades exploded and shots were fired in Shanhaiguan, an old fortress at the point where the Great Wall of China runs down to the sea. The explosions went off by the Japanese military police post and by a Japanese outpost at the railway station. The Japanese garrison immediately accused Chinese soldiers of the attack and demanded that they leave part of the town. When the Chinese refused, fighting broke out on 2 January, and on 3 January a Japanese division, supported by aircraft, tanks, armoured trains and naval gunfire, took the fortress. Thus began the campaign that the Chinese call the defence of the Great Wall (changcheng kangzhan) and the Japanese the Rehe operation (Nekka sakusen). By the end of May 1933 it had cost China the province of Rehe, and it ended in a truce that handed Japan the line of the Wall and opened its way into northern China.

It is often said that Japan attacked the eastern end of the Wall in the province of Rehe in Inner Mongolia. This is a shorthand that confuses two places. Shanhaiguan lay in Hebei province, right on the border with Manchuria, on the railway from Beijing to Mukden – not in Rehe. Rehe (Jehol) was a separate province lying north-west of Shanhaiguan, beyond the Wall. In 1914 it was carved out as a special district from lands then counted as part of Inner Mongolia, and in 1928 it was raised to the status of a province. Its capital was Chengde, the former summer residence of the Qing emperors. In 1933 its population consisted mostly of Chinese settlers, although Mongols also lived in its northern part. Part of the former Rehe now belongs to the Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region, the rest to the provinces of Hebei and Liaoning. The attack on Shanhaiguan was a prelude to the seizure of Rehe, but not part of it.

A wall that was to become a border

After the Mukden incident the Kwantung Army overran the three north-eastern provinces within a few months, and on 1 March 1932 Manchukuo was proclaimed under the nominal rule of Puyi. The new state’s declaration of independence already listed Rehe as part of it, alongside Fengtian, Jilin and Heilongjiang. The governor of Rehe, General Tang Yulin, a former subordinate of Zhang Zuolin, played both sides: his name appeared on the list of Manchukuo officials, but at the same time he did not break with the government in Nanjing. He ran the province as his own fiefdom and drew a large part of his income from poppy growing and the opium trade, which flowed from Rehe to Beijing and Tianjin.

For the Japanese, Rehe was the missing link. Whoever held this mountainous province had Beijing within reach and could use it to support the anti-Japanese volunteer units still fighting in Manchuria. The Kwantung Army command believed that Manchukuo’s border with China should be the Great Wall. In the summer of 1932, when a Japanese agent, Gonshirō Ishimoto, disappeared in Rehe, a Japanese detachment several hundred strong entered the eastern part of the province to look for him. In Tokyo the army said openly that Rehe belonged to Manchukuo.

Shanhaiguan closed off the only convenient route from Manchuria into northern China: the narrow coastal strip between the mountains and the Bohai Gulf, along which ran the Beijing–Mukden railway. Under the 1901 protocol that ended the Boxer Rebellion, the powers had the right to station troops along the railway from Beijing to the sea. Japan maintained a small garrison in Shanhaiguan and the nearby port of Qinhuangdao – between 150 and 200–300 men according to various sources – subordinate to the Japanese China Garrison Army headquartered in Tianjin. On the other side of the tracks stood units of the Chinese Northeastern Army, the former Manchurian troops of Zhang Xueliang. The sector was defended by the 626th Regiment of the 9th Independent Brigade under Shi Shian. The brigade was commanded by He Zhuguo, responsible for the defence of the area between Shanhaiguan and the Luan River.

There had been clashes before. At the beginning of October 1932 Manchukuo border police clashed with Chinese soldiers in Shanhaiguan, and on 8 December there was a shoot-out at the station when a Japanese armoured train stopped there. Both incidents were settled locally. Zhang Xueliang, who after the loss of Manchuria headed the northern branch of the government’s Military Affairs Commission in Beijing as acting chairman, knew that the Japanese’s next target would be Rehe. In the autumn of 1932 he began building defensive lines there and moving troops in, but he did so slowly, because Tang Yulin did not want to let outside units into his province. Chiang Kai-shek demanded a firm stance from him, but had himself thrown his best divisions against the Communists in central China. His principle was: “first internal pacification, then resistance to the external enemy”.

The New Year provocation

Late on the evening of 1 January 1933 – around 9.20 p.m. according to Japanese reports, around 11 p.m. according to Chinese ones – someone threw grenades into the grounds of the military police post by the southern gate of Shanhaiguan, near the quarters of its commander and at the Japanese outpost at the station, and fired a few shots. No one was killed. The Japanese army announced that it had been a planned attack by the Chinese side intended to damage Japan’s international position. Many historians, however, believe it was a provocation prepared by the commander of the Japanese garrison, Jinkurō Ochiai, in concert with the Kwantung Army, whose commander, General Nobuyoshi Mutō, was already preparing the Rehe operation. Chinese authors state outright that the incident was staged on Mutō’s orders. The method was the same as at Mukden in September 1931: an explosion, an accusation against the Chinese, and troops ready to act before anyone had time to investigate.

The Japanese demanded that Chinese soldiers, police and the public order guard leave the southern part of the town, including the gate, which Japanese troops were to occupy. The Chinese refused. On the morning of 2 January the Japanese occupied the station and disarmed the Chinese police, then attacked the gate. The first assault was repulsed; a Japanese lieutenant, Toshio Kodama, was killed in it. The Japanese sent the Chinese brigade an ultimatum: its troops were to leave Shanhaiguan immediately. That same day reinforcements arrived by train from General Yoshikazu Nishi’s 8th Division, stationed along the railway in western Manchuria. The fighting went on until evening and again brought the Japanese no success.

That evening General Mutō ordered the commander of the 4th Infantry Brigade, General Yoshimichi Suzuki, to take the town together with the garrison. On the morning of 3 January the Japanese attacked with more than a brigade, several armoured trains and about ten tanks. Aircraft bombed the Chinese positions, and Japanese warships, destroyers among them, shelled them from the sea. Sappers blew in the gate. The Chinese soldiers had only rifles, machine guns and a few field guns. Around noon or in the early afternoon (sources give different times) the Japanese broke through the defences at the south-eastern corner of the walls and raised their flag over the gate. An Dexin’s battalion, which held this sector, was almost entirely wiped out together with its commander and most of its officers. In the afternoon Shi Shian led the remnants of the regiment to the west bank of the Shi River. According to various accounts the regiment lost half its strength or more. In the following days the Japanese occupied the surrounding hills, and on 10 January the Jiumenkou pass north of the town, through which ran the road to Rehe.

The dispute over who started it

The Chinese government protested in Tokyo and notified the League of Nations, which since the autumn of 1932 had been considering the Lytton Report on Manchuria. In China the capture of Shanhaiguan caused outrage. Newspapers wrote of the “gateway to China” that the enemy had forced, and students in Beijing and Shanghai demanded war. Part of the Western press, however, accepted the Japanese version that the Chinese had provoked the clash in the hope of League intervention. Japan was adept at presenting each successive incident as the defence of its own soldiers, who were stationed in China under treaties.

In Tokyo the government of Admiral Makoto Saitō insisted that the Shanhaiguan affair was a local incident on Chinese territory that should be kept separate from the question of Rehe. Rehe was regarded as an internal matter for Manchukuo. On 11 January the Army Ministry announced that the province was “inseparably linked” with the other three and that Governor Tang Yulin had recognised the sovereignty of Manchukuo’s ruler. On 21 January Foreign Minister Kōsai Uchida repeated this in the Diet, saying that the border between Manchuria and China was the Great Wall. After a few days the Japanese troops halted at Shanhaiguan and advanced no further into Hebei, and their commanders offered the Chinese a local settlement. The signal, however, was clear: Japan was taking possession of the gateway through which it could enter both Rehe and northern China.

Preparations for the war over Rehe

The capture of Shanhaiguan secured the flank of the Kwantung Army for its planned advance into Rehe. On 4 February 1933 Emperor Hirohito, at the request of the Chief of the General Staff, approved the operation, but on condition that the army did not cross the Great Wall or bomb the areas south of it. On the Chinese side, Zhang Xueliang and the ministers who had come from Nanjing, headed by Song Ziwen (T. V. Soong), declared in mid-February that China would defend Rehe with all its strength. On 23 February Japan demanded the withdrawal of Chinese troops from the province and began its offensive the same day. Tang Yulin fled without a fight, and on 4 March the Japanese vanguard entered Chengde. Then came heavy fighting for the passes of the Wall, Japanese thrusts deep into Hebei, and finally the truce concluded on 31 May at Tanggu near Tianjin.

Those five months showed how unequal the forces were. The Japanese had aircraft, tanks, heavy artillery and good supplies. Many Chinese units had rifles of assorted types, little ammunition and almost no heavy weapons. Chiang Kai-shek’s government did not want war with Japan until it had crushed the Communists, and the commanders of the northern armies, former warlords, distrusted Nanjing and did not want to lose their troops.

On the road to war

The capture of Shanhaiguan was a small operation but an important precedent. For the first time since 1931 the Japanese army from Manchukuo had attacked China proper, south of the Wall, and once again it did so on the pretext of an incident it had itself engineered. The Japanese had used the same pattern at Mukden in 1931 and in Shanghai in January 1932 (the Shanghai incident), and they would use it many more times. The troops stationed in northern China under the Boxer Protocol would, in July 1937, be a party to the clash at the Marco Polo Bridge near Beijing, with which open Sino-Japanese war began.

The campaign that began at Shanhaiguan concluded the first stage of Japanese expansion. Manchukuo was enlarged by Rehe and its border rested on the Great Wall. Japan, condemned by the League of Nations, left it. China was forced into a truce that left the Japanese a free hand in northern China. At the same time the fighting in the passes of the Wall, where Chinese troops for the first time put up stiff resistance to the Japanese for several weeks, became a symbol in China: proof that resistance was possible, and an indictment of the policy of concessions that Chiang Kai-shek pursued until 1937.