• Table of Contents
• Introduction
• Frequently Cited Works

13. The Japanese Move South, the Reds West

The League of Nations' Lytton commission finally agreed on a unanimous position in September, 1932, after the French member convinced the chairman, Lord Lytton of Britain, to omit a declaration calling Japan an aggressor.1

Japan didn't wait until the Lytton report was published to commit itself to control of Manchuria. On September 15, 1932, it recognized the state of Manchukuo and the puppet in turn accepted Japan as advisor and guardian.2 The commission announced its findings on October 2, 1932, nearly ten months after the league decided to set up a commission of inquiry.3

The Lytton commission's report was not surprising, given the fact that all its members represented current or former colonial powers with a strong sense of the blessings that "advanced nations" could bestow upon benighted lands. It found both Japan and China guilty. It blamed China for the damage Japan had suffered (mainly from boycotts) as a result of the ferment in China and eulogized the contributions Japan had made to the Manchurian economy. It found, however, that the Kwantung army had been guided "by essentially political considerations" and Manchukuo existed only through Japanese support. The commission recommended, not that Manchuria be returned forthwith to China, but that it be governed by an autonomous regime with foreign advisors and that "a substantial proportion should be Japanese." The report in effect called for a joint foreign control of Manchuria instead of Japanese control.4

As expected, the Japanese press damned the report but Western countries praised it by and large. The principal reason for international acceptance was the failure of the U.S. to take action. But underneath lurked another attitude that also was to emerge soon thereafter in condoning Adolf

Hitler and the excesses of Nazism in Germany. It was expressed most clearly in November, 1932, by Sir Thomas Wilford, New Zealand's high commissioner in London. Wilford said the British empire should back Japan in China because it was "our chief bulwark against what was possibly the principal danger to the world at the present time—namely the spread of communism."5 Communism had been the bête noir of the capitalist countries for over a dozen years, and many people were willing to sacrifice principles, justice and much else to stop it. But Communism in China was not being prevented by Japan. The surest defense against it was reform of the inequities of Chinese society. Chiang Kai-shek and the Nationalists were uninterested in such reform. Their only remedy was to destroy the Reds, not to eradicate the conditions which gave them their reason for being and their continued strength.

* * * * * * * * * *

On January 1, 1933, two events occurred which gave a symbolic portent of things to come in China: in the south, Chiang Kai-shek assembled 150,000 men and launched his fourth "bandit-suppression" campaign against the central Communist soviet in the Wuyi mountains, while at Shanhaiguan, where the Great Wall comes down to the sea, Japanese and Chinese soldiers commenced a brief flurry of new fighting.6

Soon thereafter, the Japanese occupied Shanhaiguan, a sure hint of further aggression.7 On February 23, 1933, the Japanese demanded that the Chinese evacuate the province of Jehol, which covered much of present-day north Hebei and western Liaoning provinces. The Japanese maintained that Jehol, being beyond the Great Wall, was a part of Manchuria, which was not true. Within ten days, the Japanese occupied the province, despite the fact that Zhang Xueliang had nearly 200,000 troops in Jehol. Zhang's troops fell back to the Wall without fighting.8

The day before Japan's latest aggression the League of Nations finally brought the Lytton report to a vote. Only Japan opposed and Siam (Thailand) abstained. The remaining states approved the weak recommendations. Japan's delegation left the hall and a month later Japan withdrew from the league.9

The league's performance had been pathetic. In its first great test, it had failed miserably. The league was a wonderful arena for politicians to mouth high-flown phrases and idealistic rhetoric. This was good for elections and newspaper headlines back home. But the powers were not ready to relinquish their authority to a world body. The powers probably would have backed the United States if it had taken a strong stand but individually they were unwilling to challenge Japan. The failure of leadership by democratic nations, especially the U.S., gave Japan the freedom to expand in East Asia and encouraged the fascist dictatorships of Italy and Germany to embark on their careers of violent conquest.

* * * * * * * * * *

Chiang failed in his "bandit suppression" campaign. In the spring of 1933, Reds moved out of their Wuyi mountains sanctuary and sought to capture Nancheng, northeast of Ruijin, and Loan, 100 miles northwest. In the end, KMT forces managed to hold these towns but the soviet actually expanded during this period.10

Chiang Kai-shek now faced a critical decision in north China. The Japanese had taken Jehol and their troops were poised at the Great Wall, only a few days march from China's northern metropolis, Beiping, and the north China plain, the home of scores of millions of people. But Chiang did not want to fight Japan, though he seized on the debacle of Zhang Xueliang's precipitate retreat to get rid of the Manchurian warlord. Zhang handed over the 170,000 troops he had left and embarked on the traditional "foreign voyage" that many Chinese politicians took when they fell from office.11

Meanwhile, leaders of Japan's army worked out plans to move into north China. On April 1, 1933, without authorization from Tokyo, the Kwantung army launched savage attacks on two Wall gateways and swiftly drove Chinese troops several miles behind the Wall. In May, while Chiang Kai-shek pursued truce talks, Japanese troops pressed to within a few miles of Beiping and Japanese warplanes flew over the city, terrorizing the people.12

In this new crisis, the new United States president, Franklin D. Roosevelt, did virtually nothing. Roosevelt was preoccupied with the severe economic depression in the U.S.13 He demonstrated in his first weeks as chief executive a reticence to take firm stands on foreign issues. This hesitation was to recur again and again in the years ahead. His secretary of state, Cordell Hull, and the chief of the State Department's Far East division, Stanley K. Hornbeck, abetted FDR in this policy. Both were good at talk and poor in action. As Robert Dallek, chronicler of FDR's foreign policy writes, Hull repeatedly lectured Japan on "principles of good behavior," while Hornbeck, son of a Methodist minister, "shared Hull's passion for moral pronouncements." The U.S. ambassador to Japan, Joseph C. Grew, limited himself to contacts with prominent people and knew only a few moderate admirals and almost no army officers. He erroneously reported that moderates would soon regain control of the government and begin cooperating with foreign governments. The result was that Roosevelt and Hull did not quickly come to grips with Japan's ambitions.14

Meanwhile, Britain, now preoccupied with the threat of Germany, let it be known the whole Far East issue was "an American problem." Roosevelt, however, on May 20 merely issued a joint statement with China's minister of finance, T.V. Soong (brother of Chiang Kai-shek's wife, Soong May-ling), which expressed the hope that "these hostilities may soon cease" without uttering a single word of reproach at Japan's aggression.15

On May 31, 1933, Chiang signed the Tanggu truce, which amounted to a virtual abandonment of 5,000 square miles of north China, from Beiping to the Wall. Chiang agreed to demilitarize the region and also move all but peacekeeping troops out of the Beiping-Tianjin area and prohibit anti-Japanese activities. This important area now became a Japanese protectorate and the Tanggu truce marked the first move toward conquest of north China. Japanese troops occupied Dolonor, gateway to Chahar (northern Inner Mongolia), and began to encourage the Mongols to demand autonomy, under Japanese control, of course. The success of Japanese advances undermined the nonexpansionists in the Japanese cabinet and War Minister Akari was able to raise military expenditures in 1934 to 43 per cent of the budget, nearly double the 1930 level.16

* * * * * * * * * *

Although saying little publicly, President Roosevelt nevertheless was alarmed.17 In June Roosevelt ordered expansion of the U.S. Navy (but within the confines of the London naval conference), allocating 238 million dollars to build thirty-two warships with 120,000 tons on top of a congressional appropriation for five ships with 17,000 tons. It set off the largest American construction program since 1916 but still was to produce a navy 175,000 tons below the strength authorized at London.18 Roosevelt's decision was a dramatic American policy turnabout and began to reduce the advantage Japan was enjoying. Ambassador Grew wired that Japanese naval leaders were "bitterly disappointed" by the U.S. construction program and would demand parity with the U.S. and Britain when the London naval treaty came up for discussion in 1935.19

In September, 1933, Hirota Koki became Japanese foreign minister and he tried to get an agreement not to go beyond conquering Manchuria provided China would desist from anti-Japanese policies and work with Japan in economic development. "The cooperative concert of Japan, Manchukuo and China should be realized under the leadership of imperial Japan," he said. Hirota also wanted to "cooperate" with the United States, Britain and other powers provided they also recognized the new realities. It was a cynical policy that served Japan's interests alone and no nation endorsed it.

Chiang Kai-shek stepped up his appeasement of Japan. He demonstrated his "sincerity" by ending the boycott of Japanese goods and halting anti-Japanese education in the public schools, moves that didn't pacify the Japanese army but softened the attitude of the government.20

* * * * * * * * * *

Chiang used his newfound freedom of action to organize what he hoped would be a final solution to the rural Communist soviets. His German advisors were working to build a modern army for the Kuomintang. To advance this further, Chiang invited the former commander-in-chief (1919-26) of the German Reichswehr, General Hans von Seeckt, now retired, to come to China.21 In the spring of 1933, von Seeckt made the first of two well-paid visits and outlined plans for a well-equipped, centrally controlled, thoroughly trained army with an elite officers corps almost identical to that which he wanted for Germany. In light of China's poverty, it was utterly unrealistic and visionary,22 though the KMT tried to follow his recommendations.23

Chiang may or may not have got advice from von Seeckt about how to destroy the rural soviets. The Nationalists said not.24 Chiang's plan resembled more than anything the method the British finally devised to end Boer guerrilla resistance in the last stage of the South African War (1899-1902) by moving civilians in large numbers into concentration camps and building mutually supporting blockhouses which restricted the movement of the Boer fighters.

Chiang constructed 700 miles of motor roads to give access to the rough Wuyi mountain highlands of the central soviet. He moved troops into position in October, 1933, and stormed into the soviet areas a month later.25 The Communist leadership met at Ruijin in January, 1934, to prepare for the blow. The antipathy of the 28 Bolsheviks and their allies against Mao Zedong showed by their refusal to include Mao on the ruling politburo, though they kept him on the central committee.

By the first of February, 1934, Chiang Kai-shek was tightening the noose around the central soviet with 750,000 men, while several hundred thousand more troops were closing in on the smaller soviets elsewhere. The crucial battle was going to be fought in the central soviet where the Reds had about 200,000 men, less than a third of the KMT strength. But their greatest weakness was their lack of offensive weapons: no aircraft (against 150 Nationalist fighter-bombers), practically no artillery and only limited ammunition for machine guns and small arms.26

Chiang Kai-shek's greatest strength, however, was not his superior armament but his new strategy, a virtual "walling in" of the soviet area. With every step the Nationalists took, they evacuated the people to concentration camps, leaving a deserted region, barren of food and friends. Blockhouses at intervals of two-thirds of a mile formed an interconnected cordon that limited Red troop movement and permitted blockhouse garrisons to support the fire of adjacent blockhouses. As the KMT soldiers slowly advanced, they built more blockhouses. Red food supplies shrank.

* * * * * * * * * *

Meanwhile, the Japanese foreign ministry's information division announced (April 17, 1934) a policy to tie China wholly to Japan and to exclude all other powers from the Middle Kingdom. This was the outrageous "Amau doctrine," issued by Amau Eiji, information chief. Amau asserted that Japan had the "duty" to "keep peace and order in East Asia." Therefore, Japan opposed "any attempt on the part of China to avail herself of the influence of any other country in order to resist Japan."27

In the wake of the international furor which followed, Foreign Minister Hirota reprimanded Amau and told the cabinet it was a "mistake," although Amau's statement was a paraphrase of a message Hirota himself had sent to the Japanese ambassador to China only four days before. In this message, Hirota referred three times to Japan's "mission in East Asia," as if the task of dominating China had been imposed on Japan by some superhuman or heavenly being.28 Hirota's plan was essentially the policy of the 1915 twenty-one demands written in different language.

China protested but the British government, in keeping with its virtual renunciation to the United States of responsibility for East Asia, sent only a lame protest.29 The response of the United States was no better. Cordell Hull's message was deliberately nonprovocative. On May 1 Japan declared it had "no intention of harming the interest of any foreign nation in China." Yet in a talk with Secretary Hull on May 19, the new Japanese ambassador, Saito Hiroshi, still insisted Japan had a "superior duty" to preserve the peace in East Asia and also presented a notorious proposal which came to be known as the "Japanese Monroe Doctrine." He asked that the United States recognize Japan in the western Pacific as the "principal stabilizing factor," while Japan would recognize the U.S. in a like fashion in the eastern Pacific. This would have turned all of East Asia over to Japan and given the United States nothing it didn't already possess. Hull rejected the flagrantly self-serving Japanese démarche.30

The Japanese cabinet of Saito Makoto resigned on July 8, 1934, after finance ministry officials were charged in a bribe involving a Japanese industrial firm. But both Hirota and Hayashi Senjuro, who had succeeded Araki Sadao as army minister, stayed in their jobs in the new government run by Admiral Okada Keisuke.31

* * * * * * * * * *

Chiang Kai-shek's offensive against the soviets in south-central China got unexpected assistance from the Reds themselves. The Comintern agent with the Reds, a German or Austrian named Otto Braun (called Li De by the Chinese), conceived the idea of concentrating forces for "fast and close sorties" against the KMT forces while they were building new blockhouses. It was essentially a policy of direct frontal attacks in contrast to Mao's tactics of luring the enemy into friendly territory and ambushing him or creating conditions for surprise attacks.32 The direct assaults usually failed in the face of blockhouses, aircraft and artillery, which repeatedly fought the Red attackers to a standstill and inflicted terrible casualties.

In April, 1934, the Kuomintang troops pressed to the vicinity of Guangchang, north of Ruijin. Guangchang was the gateway to the central soviet and the Red leadership decided it was crucial to hold. The Reds moved up four corps and installed fortifications but Kuomintang fighter-bombers and artillery flattened them. The Red commander, Peng Dehuai, did not like exposing his troops in this way but the politburo supported Braun. Red soldiers attacked again and again into the teeth of KMT artillery and machine guns. When it was over, the Reds had lost more than 4,000 dead and 20,000 wounded.33

The Red army was now crippled and it was clear Otto Braun's tactics were not working. In early May the central committee held an emergency meeting. After much debate, it adopted a desperate plan by Zhou Enlai: the 10th Corps would advance into Fujian and Zhejiang to divert Chiang's attention, the 6th Corps isolated in the Jinggang shan would move into northwestern Hunan to strengthen He Long's little army, while people in the central soviet would prepare to evacuate by stockpiling food and supplies.

The KMT forces did not resume their advance until early July but Red forces declined by desertions. The soldiers were suffering from malnutrition and many lost faith in the revolution. By summer the Red army was below 150,000 men.34

The 10th Corps under Fang Zhimin split into small units and moved into Fujian and Zhejiang in early July but it failed to divert KMT forces. Local Nationalist units wiped out most corps elements in January, 1935, captured Fang Zhimin, exhibited him around the countryside in a bamboo cage and finally beheaded him at Nanchang.35 At the end of July, 1934, the 6th Corps began a roundabout trek to join He Long. KMT forces harassed its 7,000 men much of the way and the corps was down to only 1,000 men when it reached He Long.36

The Nationalists now pressed the Reds in the central soviet into a smaller and smaller pocket. By October, the time had come to flee. Though the only route open was to the west, the leaders had no clear destination. Their original goal was to join He Long. The Red army, now down to some 78,000 combat soldiers, was concentrated in a small area in the vicinity of Ruijin. There were also about 20,000 wounded, mostly being cared for by villagers.37 Compressed in this tiny region were the army's logistic and supply units, the republic's printing plants, mints and radio stations and government staffs.38

Mao Zedong was not a key figure in the decision to evacuate. Ever since August, Mao, 40 years old, had been living at Yudu, west of Ruijin, with his wife, He Zizhen, aged 24, pregnant for the fourth time. He was gaunt from a recurrence of malaria and was still convalescent. The probable reason he had been sent to Yudu was that party leaders wanted Mao to remain in the soviet region and not retreat with the army. But Mao had no intention of staying and he remained too prestigious for anyone to challenge.39

However, the leadership ordered most of Mao's close supporters to remain behind with 6,000 soldiers under Mao's friend, Chen Yi. They were to serve as the rear guard and to maintain a guerrilla presence. Also left were a number of activists and the wounded, who were scattered in hospitals in the mountains. Chen's forces broke into small detachments, suffered severe harassment from the Nationalists and within months were reduced to remnants hiding in the mountains.40

The remaining Communists, about 72,000 soldiers organized as the First Army and 14,500 officials, civilians, wives of important leaders and workers in the government and army agencies, assembled for the breakout on October 16, 1934.41 Although dedicated as a whole to the Communist movement, most of the soldiers were incredibly young. More than half were aged 16 to 23 years; a few "little devils" (xiao gui) who served as buglers, messengers and nurses were only 11 or 12.42 Just prior to the breakout, the 1st Corps under Lin Biao feigned an attack to the north while the entire column moved rapidly southwestward behind the 3rd Corps under Peng Dehuai who broke through the thinly held Nationalist cordon at a point about 75 miles southwest of Ruijin. The Long March had begun.

* * * * * * * * * *

As the Red army fled westward, the Japanese army, navy and foreign ministries agreed on December 7, 1934, to exploit the fact that the Nationalists and the Communists had turned their guns on each other instead of the external enemy. Japan resolved to advance under the shield of China's internal strife to separate the northern part of the country from the remainder.43

Meanwhile, a Japanese delegation was meeting in London with American and British representatives to discuss revision of the 1930 naval treaty. President Roosevelt had sent his chief delegate, Norman H. Davis, to London with a proposal that had no chance of acceptance, because FDR already knew Japan was going to tear up the treaty.44 This meant the U.S. would be compelled to commence a massive naval building program to match Japan's. To prevent criticism, Roosevelt wanted to throw the blame upon Japan. He therefore called for a 20 per cent reduction in naval armament by all powers that signed the treaty. Davis had some trouble with Britain but finally got support. Japan would accept nothing less than parity and renounced the treaty as of its expiration date at the end of 1936.45

The Japanese navy had always stressed quality rather than quantity in its vessels and armament. Naval architects now were seeking to build a navy that was so qualitatively superior that it could beat the combined U.S. and British fleets. But Japanese admirals, like their counterparts in the American and Royal navies, believed the battleship and its big guns was the key to naval power. They continued to see the aircraft carrier as merely an auxiliary, though useful in scouting before a battle, harassing the enemy's fleet and defending the battle line against air attacks. As a consequence, the Japanese concentrated on creating the world's best battleship fleet.46

U.S. leaders were anxious about the impending Japanese naval buildup but were mollified by one glaring weakness in Japan's strategic position: the nearest source of abundant oil was in the Netherlands East Indies, nearly 3,000 miles from Tokyo. Naval experts figured, if worst came to worst, they could always close off the Indies, blockade Japan's home islands and starve Japan into submission. It was a dangerously facile argument and led to American leaders taking the Japanese threat less seriously than it was.47

The decision of Japan to build a huge navy came only weeks after Italian troops clashed with Ethiopian forces at the oasis of Wal Wal in the Ogaden region near the border of Italian Somaliland. Italian dictator Benito Mussolini deliberately engineered this incident as an excuse to invade Ethiopia and build an Italian empire in the horn of Africa. Europe already had been unsettled since the year previously (October 14, 1933) when Adolf Hitler, the Nazi German chancellor, had announced Germany's withdrawal from the international disarmament conference and the League of Nations, a signal that he planned to rearm Germany.

Chapter 14: The Long March >>

• Home
• About
• Books
  • Such Troops as These
  • MacArthur's War
  • Sun Tzu at Gettysburg
  • Inside the Nazi War Machine
  • How The South Could Have Won the Civil War
  • How America Got It Right
  • How Wars Are Won: The 13 Rules of War
  • Robert E. Lee's Civil War
  • The Future of Warfare
  • How Great Generals Win
  • Lost Victories: The Military Genius of Stonewall Jackson
  • The Strange Connection: U.S. Intervention in China, 1944-1972
  • How Hitler Could Have Won World War II
  • Korea: The First War We Lost
• Excerpts
  • Rules of War
  • Early Wars
  • Napoleonic Wars
  • Civil War
  • World War I
  • World War II
  • Korean War
  • Cold War
  • Terror & Future Wars
• Commentary
• Q & A
• Korea
• China
  • Table of Contents
  • Introduction
  • Frequently Cited Works
• College Course on the Rules of War
  • Introduction
  • Syllabus
  • Chapter Details
  • Study Exercise
  • Numbers
  • Ockham's Razor
  • Writing

Copyright©1986-2017 Bevin Alexander • All rights reserved • Site Map