national pride. No Japanese must accept the
insulting, inferior role the Western imperialists
assigned to them. Only by showing forceful
courage would the West ever be convinced of the
equality of Japan. The view of many American
politicians was precisely the counterpart of this;
the Japanese would give way if shown a firm hand.
While Western Realpolitikwas certainly prac-
tised by Japanese policy makers, the ultimate
factor deciding national policy was not rational
policy but chauvinism masquerading as spiritual
values. The chief of the Japanese naval general
staff, for instance, urged in 1941 that Japan
should wage war to remain true to the spirit of
national defence, saying, ‘even if we might not
win the war, this noble spirit of defending the
fatherland will be perpetuated and our posterity
will rise again and again’. The ‘spirit’ of war itself
was glorified; a nation that denied this spirit and
did not rise against injustice would deserve to
decay. The ‘injustice’ referred to was America’s
denial that Japan had the sole right to shape
China’s destiny. All this chauvinistic spirituality
was not the inevitable heritage of Japanese beliefs.
There were opposing views, socialist, pacific views
based on different Japanese traditions.
Britain and the US formally protested at
Japanese aggression in China, but there was no
thought in the 1930s of resisting it by force so
long as only China was involved. Japan, more-
over, stressed the anti-communist aspect of its
policy when concluding the Anti-Comintern Pact
with Germany in November 1936. The following
summer of 1937 was decisive in the policies
pursued by the Kwantung and Manchurian
armies. In June Russia’s capability to hinder
Japanese objectives in China was tested. There
was more sporadic fighting on the borders with
Russia in 1938. The fighting capacity of the
Soviet Union had recovered sufficiently from
Stalin’s purges of the armed forces to inflict a
severe defeat on the Japanese army at Nomonhan
in August 1939. More than 18,000 Japanese were
killed. This evidence of Soviet strength, coming
close on the heels of the German–Soviet Non-
Aggression Pact, led the Japanese to revise their
estimate that Russia was too weak to interfere in
China. The Soviet Union became an important
factor in Japan’s calculations. Meanwhile the die
in China had long been cast, but the Japanese
army, despite its victorious advances, could not
bring the China War to an end.
The Japanese army had continued to interfere
and expand its influence in northern China from
1933 to 1937, but in the whole of northern China
the Japanese garrison was only 6,000 men. Then,
near Peking, on an ancient bridge, Chinese and
Japanese soldiers clashed in July 1937. The Marco
Polo Bridge incident was in itself minor; exactly
how a small number of Japanese and Chinese
troops came to clash is still obscure. There is no
evidence (unlike in Manchuria in 1931) that the
Japanese army had planned war against China and
provoked the conflict. There were divided counsels
in Tokyo. The hawks won. At first, sharp local
actions were undertaken in the expectation that
Nationalist China would be overawed. Full-scale
war ensued when Chiang Kai-shek chose to resist
instead. The war quickly spread from northern
China. The Japanese attacked Shanghai and by
December 1937 the Nationalist capital of Nanking
had fallen. Japanese reinforcements had been
rushed to China. In the Shanghai–Nanking opera-
tion the Japanese suffered 70,000 casualties and
the Chinese at least 370,000. By then 700,000
Japanese troops were engaged in China. After
1938 close to 1 million Japanese troops were fight-
ing some 3 million Chinese troops. The Japanese
troops behaved with the utmost brutality, mas-
sacring, raping and looting. The ‘rape of Nanking’
leaving 20,000 Chinese civilians dead, became a
byword for barbarity, shocking the West. It was
not the end of the war, as the Japanese hoped, but
its beginning. The China War became a three-
sided struggle between the Chinese Communists,
the Chinese Nationalists and the Japanese. The
Communists’ main priority was to gain control
over as much of the territories evacuated by the
Nationalists as they could. The Nationalist Chinese
armies bore the brunt of the regular fighting.The sinking of the US naval vessel, Panay, and
damage to the British Ladybirdin December
1937 directly involved the two Western powers in
the conflict. Since the autumn of 1937 Roosevelt
had been searching for some effective counterblast
to German, Italian and now Japanese aggression.
He gave expression to his desire for ‘positive