The Japanese invasion of Manchuria begins

By dawn on 19 September 1931 the Japanese Kwantung Army was master of Mukden (Shenyang), the capital of Manchuria. A few hours after the explosion on the South Manchuria Railway, which its own officers had staged and blamed on the Chinese (the Mukden incident), its units had captured the Beidaying barracks and the old city, and in the course of the day they occupied almost every important town along the Japanese railway, from Yingkou on the Gulf of Liaodong to Changchun in the north. On the same day in Tokyo the government of Prime Minister Reijirō Wakatsuki decided that the conflict must not be allowed to spread. Over the following days and months it became clear that it was not the government but the army that decided Japan’s policy on the continent.

Some war chronologies record under this date that the Japanese “invaded Manchuria and set up the puppet state of Manchukuo”. The invasion did indeed begin on 18 and 19 September, but the conquest of the whole of Manchuria lasted until February 1932, and Manchukuo was proclaimed only on 1 March 1932. In September 1931 even the Kwantung Army did not yet know whether Manchuria was to be annexed or governed by Chinese authorities subservient to Japan.

The first day

The orders issued during the night by the commander of the Kwantung Army, General Shigeru Honjō, and drafted by Lieutenant Colonel Kanji Ishiwara, provided for an attack on Chinese forces throughout the railway zone. On the morning of 19 September the Japanese took, without much resistance, Andong (today Dandong) on the Yalu, Yingkou, Fenghuangcheng, Liaoyang and Fushun. The only bloody fighting was near Changchun, where some 6,000 Chinese soldiers in the Nanling and Kuanchengzi barracks fought back. The Japanese lost 66 killed and 79 wounded there – far more than in the fighting for Mukden, where by their own figures only a handful of Japanese and a few hundred Chinese were killed.

Honjō and his staff officers, Ishiwara among them, left Port Arthur by special train early in the morning and reached Mukden at noon, where he moved his headquarters. At 6 p.m. he cabled the Chief of the General Staff, General Hanzō Kanaya, that the Kwantung Army should take responsibility for maintaining order throughout Manchuria, including its northern part, and asked for three divisions of reinforcements. In effect he was announcing the occupation of the entire country. The next day Colonel Kenji Doihara, head of the Japanese special mission, became mayor of Mukden, which was given back its old name of Fengtian. The Chinese authorities of Liaoning province soon moved to Jinzhou in the west.

“The Non-Resistance General”

China’s strongest regional army offered no resistance. Its commander, the Young Marshal Zhang Xueliang, was in Beijing and even before the incident had ordered his troops not to return fire in response to Japanese provocations. On 19 September he ordered them to withdraw and to rely on diplomacy. He expected the Japanese, as in the past, to confine themselves to a local clash, and he feared that his army, a large part of which was stationed south of the Great Wall, would lose an open war. Chiang Kai-shek’s government in Nanjing, preoccupied with the war against the Communists, a dispute with rivals in Canton (Guangzhou) and the aftermath of a catastrophic flood on the Yangtze, did not want war with Japan either. Historians disagree about how far the decision on “non-resistance” was Zhang’s own and how far it was Chiang’s. The Chinese press dubbed Zhang “the Non-Resistance General” and blamed him for the loss of Manchuria.

On 21 September China appealed to the League of Nations, invoking Article 11 of its Covenant. Chiang adopted a principle he formulated as “first internal pacification, then external resistance”, and hoped that the powers and the League would force Japan to withdraw. Huge demonstrations broke out in Chinese cities, and a boycott of Japanese goods began.

Tokyo: the government against the army

The first news of the fighting reached the General Staff in Tokyo at 1 a.m. on 19 September. In the morning the army’s leaders concluded that the Kwantung Army had acted “entirely properly”. The cabinet met at 10 a.m. Prime Minister Wakatsuki asked the War Minister, General Jirō Minami, whether the army really was acting in self-defence, and the minister confirmed that it was. The Foreign Minister, Kijūrō Shidehara, however, read out cables from the consuls in Manchuria suggesting that the incident might have been the army’s own work. The government announced a policy of “non-expansion” of the conflict. The Chief of the General Staff also forbade further action by the army in Korea, whose commander, General Senjūrō Hayashi, had already sent aircraft to Manchuria at Honjō’s request and readied a brigade. The brigade halted at the border, at Sinŭiju.

The Kwantung Army had no intention of obeying. On 21 September, against orders, it occupied Jilin, where power was taken over by General Xi Qia, who collaborated with the Japanese. On the same day, at 1.20 p.m., the 39th Mixed Brigade from Korea crossed the Yalu on Hayashi’s orders and came under the command of the Kwantung Army. Sending troops abroad without the emperor’s consent was a serious breach of military law. Wakatsuki and his ministers were outraged but did not dare to confront the army. The army leadership in Tokyo made it clear that if the government ordered the troops withdrawn, the War Minister would resign and the army would not nominate a successor, which would mean the fall of the cabinet. On 22 September the government approved the funding for the operation, accepting the fait accompli, and Emperor Hirohito gave his consent to it. Although he was displeased and admonished the Chief of the General Staff to be more careful in future, no one was punished. Wakatsuki is said to have remarked that he lacked the strength to restrain the army.

On 24 September the Japanese government declared that it had no territorial ambitions in Manchuria and that its troops would return to the railway zone as soon as the safety of Japanese nationals was assured. The Council of the League of Nations accepted this assurance. On 30 September it unanimously – with Japan’s vote as well – called on both sides to restore normal relations and on Japan to withdraw its troops as soon as possible, but set no deadline.

How the invasion spread

Northern Manchuria was the most sensitive area. Through Harbin ran the Chinese Eastern Railway, jointly managed by the USSR, which only two years earlier had shown that it was ready to defend it by force. The General Staff in Tokyo feared that a march northwards would drag Japan into war with Moscow, and for several weeks forbade the Kwantung Army to cross the Nen River. The officers in Mukden, above all Ishiwara, believed on the contrary that the USSR, absorbed in collectivisation and the first Five-Year Plan, was not ready for war and that the moment had to be seized. They were right. Moscow confined itself to protests, and in 1935 it sold its stake in the railway to Manchukuo.

Tokyo’s assurances soon proved meaningless. On 8 October Japanese aircraft – with Ishiwara aboard one of them – bombed Jinzhou, where Zhang Xueliang’s authorities had taken refuge. It was one of the first air raids on a city since the First World War and caused outrage in Europe. On 24 October the League Council called on Japan to withdraw its troops by 16 November, but Japan voted against, and the resolution, which required unanimity, did not take effect. In November the Kwantung Army clashed on the Nen River with the forces of the governor of Heilongjiang, General Ma Zhanshan, one of the few who chose to fight and who became a hero in China, and on 19 November it took Qiqihar in the north. At the turn of the year it took Jinzhou, and in February 1932 Harbin. In December 1931 Wakatsuki’s government fell in Japan, and with it Shidehara’s conciliatory policy.

Agents worked alongside the army. In November Doihara spirited Puyi, the last emperor of the Qing dynasty, earmarked as head of the future state, out of Tianjin to Manchuria. As early as September 1931 the Kwantung Army had abandoned the plan of annexation in favour of a formally independent state under Japanese control, because annexation would have been too blatant a breach of the treaties. Japanese society enthusiastically supported the victorious army. A few critics, such as the economic commentator Tanzan Ishibashi, warned that the Chinese drive for unity could not be broken by force.

Significance

19 September 1931 showed that the Japanese army could drag the state into war against the wishes of its own government, and with impunity. A government that proclaimed the “non-expansion” of the fighting approved within a few days what it had not wanted. This pattern – action by units in the field followed by Tokyo’s consent – was repeated in northern China in 1933–1937 and in July 1937, when full-scale war with China broke out. The officers who carried out the invasion made careers, while the politicians who tried to restrain them lost power or, like Prime Minister Tsuyoshi Inukai in May 1932, their lives.

The passivity of the powers was just as important. Neither Britain nor the United States nor France wanted sanctions against Japan, and the USSR remained neutral. The League of Nations sent a commission whose report condemned Japan only a year later, when Manchukuo already existed. Japan responded by leaving the League. The failure of the system of collective security in Manchuria was the first in a series that led, by way of Ethiopia, the Rhineland and Spain, to Munich and war. For China, September 1931 was the beginning of the humiliations that in 1937 forced Chiang Kai-shek to fight Japan.