[Japan, newly emerged at the end of the 1920s as a first-class power with a modern industrial economy and armed forces, was not a fascist state. Militarist anarchy better described the political system: any politician perceived as being a threat to the dominance of the armed services was forced out of office, or equally often, murdered out of hand, by factions of officers. Several prime ministers were assassinated, and the God-Emperor himself was more than once a target.

Japan also wanted an empire. It had some compelling reasons for doing so: the country was resource-poor and could not feed itself; as the tariff walls of the Depression rose against its exports, it became even harder to import enough rice. As a result of earlier military victories, Japan already ruled Korea, Taiwan, Sakhalin and China's Shantung Peninsula. In 1931, a Japanese-engineered incident outside Mukden, in Manchuria, was the excuse for the swift invasion and occupation of China's chief industrial area by Japanese troops. China, crippled by a complete breakdown of tradition, law and order, was in no position to put up much resistance.

Throughout the early 1930s, China was also convulsed by civil war between Communist guerrillas, led by Chu Teh and Mao Tse-tung, and the ineffectual Nationalists, headed de facto and often in fact by Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek. The latter presided over a precarious coalition of warlords, business magnates, and politicos. The Japanese took advantage of the chaos to keep up pressure for more and more economic and territorial concessions from the weak Chinese government.

By 1936, the Chinese Communist armies had completed their epic, 6,000-mile "Long March" from southeast China to northwest, and were ensconced in Yenan, when the word went out from Moscow that Communists were now to cooperate with nationalist and other forces to fight Russia's enemies, including fascists and Japanese. Accordingly, Chiang had to be persuaded to allow his troops to fight alongside the Communists, and against the Japanese.]

(December 28, 1936)

On hundreds of millions of lips last week was the name of a most unhappy woman. Mme Chiang. Four hundred and fifty million Chinese could imagine nothing more poignant than the reported fainting and prostration of Dictator Chiang Kai-shek's wife as she sat beside a radio in her sumptuous Nanking home and heard her husband's kidnapper, the Young Marshal Chang Hsuehliang broadcast from Sian in central China that his men had not only kidnapped but also murdered China's Dictator.

Presently the Nanking censor passed dispatches saying it was only the Japanese Domei News Agency which had invented "that appalling falsehood," the story of the broadcast from Sian having said the Dictator was dead.

The "Official" Program of Kidnapper Chang was as follows (full text): "The Central (Nanking) Government (of China) has not been sincere in carrying out resistance against Japan. This has been shown by lengthy negotiations and the suppression of patriotic movements. So we must gather our forces, overthrow the Central Government and expedite the national salvation.

"China should consider an immediate anti-Japanese military expedition her only national task at present. Therefore we could not wait longer. We want to fight.

"In order to consolidate our strength we must unite all patriotic forces and public bodies in a common struggle against Japanese imperialism.

"Therefore, the leading political parties of China, namely, the Kuomintang [Government Party] and the Communist parties, should unite for the common good.

"Anti-Communist military operations should be stopped and all the country's guns should be directed against Japan.

"A national defense government should be established for the purpose. The present Kuomintang Government should be abolished.

"It is regrettable that Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek still opposes our ideas. So long as he remains opposed he shall remain at Sian in order to think it over at his leisure. I personally guarantee his safety and hope he will agree with our policy."

If any such policy as the above had been broadcast to the Chinese people by their Government, except as a policy urged by a Chinese kidnapper meriting worse than death, it would have had to be considered in Tokyo by every Japanese from the Emperor down as the most extreme Chinese provocation and invitation to war.

Dictator Chiang has for so many years played such a tedious waiting game that the Young Marshal, when he publicly demanded as part of the "ransom" fortnight ago that the Nanking Government speed up and declare war on Japan, was voicing the aspiration of millions of Chinese. The announced policy of the kidnapper is so exceedingly popular--even if it is an ex-dope's not too bright idea--that almost every Chinese inevitably must be more or less drawn to it, even Dictator Chiang, who knows that he cannot procrastinate forever.

It was Chinese and it was masterly to put the whole program of war with Japan out officially from Nanking last week and see what would happen, especially what Japan would do. Japan had done so little up to this week, and Nanking had received so many telegrams of passionate loyalty to the Government from so many outlying Chinese military satraps that the kidnapping was going fine, even if somebody should get killed.

(January 4, 1937)

In their cables this week, seasoned China correspondents had an adjective for the way in which the kidnapping of Premier & Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek was ended, and all adjective was "preposterous." In any Occidental sense it was preposterous that the most powerful man in Eastern Asia should have been violently over-powered with the killing of 46 of his guards; lost his false teeth in the process; insisted upon reading the Bible during most of his 13 days' captivity at the hands of a "onetime dope fiend," Young Marshal Chang Hsueh-liang; and then should suddenly have returned by air to Nanking announcing that he himself was partly to blame for his own kidnapping and that the kidnappers had let him go partly because they had been much moved by reading some 50,000 words of his private diary covering 1936! In Oriental eyes there was nothing preposterous about all this--it was just Chinese "face saving."

Straight to her kidnapped husband rushed impulsive Mme Chiang and made him comfortable with a new set of false teeth she had brought in her purse. Next thing China knew, Generalissimo Chiang, Mme Chiang and Banker Soong all joined in sending the most positive orders to the Nanking Government that it forces under War Minister General Ho Ying-chin must not approach any nearer to Sian, and they halted in their tracks.

Unquestionably cash--millions in ransom for China's Premier--figured in the deal made at Sian, and presumably this was handled entirely by T. V. Soong in as non-governmental a capacity as possible. After all it was his own brother-in-law he was trying to rescue, and the House of Soong is the No. 1 family of China. Agreement having been reached--and apparently the kidnapper forgot all about his original high-sounding demand that the kidnappee must lead China into an immediate war with Japan.

[In fact, it was the Communists who had been reading Chiang's diaries and had become convinced of his will to fight the Japanese. There followed, a few months later, a skirmish--the "incident at the Marco Polo Bridge" outside Peking--that pitched the two sides into full-scale war. The instigators will never be known, but unlike the Manchurian provocation of 1931, it was almost certainly not manufactured by the Japanese.]

(July 19, 1937)

Meanwhile Japanese forces in North China had given notice of daytime maneuvers near Peiping. Savage shooting began at night and according to a Chinese official communique: "The Japanese fired first after certain persons had fired on Japanese emerging from Fengtai barracks for night maneuvers around Wanpinhsien and Lukouchiao." These two centres soon saw pitched battles in which 16 Japanese and some 200 Chinese were killed, with Japanese artillery plunking poorly aimed shells, one of which landed in the empty bed of a local Chinese magistrate. Increasingly sharp fighting made it no clearer who were the "certain persons" who opened fire before the Japanese "fired first," but the Chinese Government at Nanking for the first time began acting as if it were ready for war with Japan.

Never before has Chinese Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek been reported sending on troop trains, in the direction of Japanese forces, the German-trained army of crack Chinese troops known as "Chiang's Own." Latest dispatches said these were rumbling from central toward northern China, and the Japanese Embassy officials had been handed a Chinese note of such unprecedented vigor that they were visibly flabbergasted. The note demanded that the Japanese Government "formally apologize for the hostilities" in North China, then "punish the Japanese officers responsible and pay an indemnity for the Chinese casualties."

(August 9, 1937)

In Nanking last week the Dictator of China, wise and watchful Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek, manifestoed: "China is determined to fight to the last man!...The policy of our Government has been consistent from beginning to end; namely, that we cannot surrender any territory or allow our sovereignty to be encroached upon. I call upon the Nation to mobilize our total resources and struggle hand-in-hand to save China!"

(September 6, 1937)

In Tokyo last week, Cabinet Ministers scuttled in & out of Emperor Hirohito's moat-encircled palace. The assent of the Son of Heaven was required to dozens of decisions, most important of all to the drastic decision of the military high command to ship Japan's entire regular army--some 260,000 men--across the sea to China.

Staring glassily through his myopic eyes, and nodding his flat, imperial head, Hirohito gave approval to military plans which launched Japan upon a great national adventure.

Every few centuries since long before Christ, history has repeated itself in China. A warlike people, coming usually from the north, covets the vast fertile plains lying north and south of the peninsula of Shantung. Advancing step by step in a few years or a few generations, they seize the ground they cover. Such was evidently the modest plan of the Japanese who know their history when, advancing from Manchukuo, they set out in July to take possession of the northern part of Hopei Province. Their plans for an inexpensive pay-as-you-go conquest was rudely upset by the explosion at Shanghai when the Chinese attempted to bomb the Japanese admiral's flagship and attacked the Japanese forces in the International Settlement.

Last week's decision to ship the entire Japanese Army to China meant but one thing: Japan had committed herself to speeding up the slow process of history many times repeated in three millenniums. At Shanghai, nearly 100,000 Japanese troops were already involved. The campaign could no longer be fought locally. A new field of operations had been opened and the great triangle between Peiping, Shanghai and the mountains on the west had become a potential battleground.

[The Chinese bravely defended Shanghai, but could not hold back the tide elsewhere. North China was completely infested by the Japanese, whose naval forces began blockading the Chinese coast and pushing up the major rivers. By autumn, the Japanese had 200,000 men, almost their entire standing army, in China. In November, Shanghai fell; in December, Nanking, Chiang's capital. After the Japanese army entered the capital city, one of the most horrific incidents of this or any war took place: the "rape of Nanking," in which Japanese radical officers went mad with blood lust and butchered 200,000-300,000 people. News reports only began filtering out when the carnage was over.]

(February 14, 1938)

With Japanese last week still forbidding foreign correspondents to go to captured Nanking, the Chicago Daily News received last week one of the best eyewitness accounts thus far of the "Nanking atrocities" from its Far East Ace Reporter A.T. Steele.

"I have seen jackrabbit drives in the West, in which a cordon of hunters closes in on the helpless rabbits and drives them into a pen, where they are clubbed or shot. The spectacle at Nanking after the Japanese captured the city was very much the same, with human beings as the victims...

"The Japanese were bent on butchery. They were not to be content until they had slaughtered every soldier or official they could lay hands on...One Japanese soldier stood over the growing pile of corpses with a rifle pouring bullets into any of the bodies which showed movement.

"This may be war to the Japanese, but it looked like murder to me." Best estimates are that the Japanese executed 20,000 at Nanking, slew 114,000 Chinese soldiers in the Shanghai-Nanking phase of the war, lost 11,200 Japanese in this phase.

(April 18, 1938)

Protestant and Jewish philanthropic groups with branches in China had by last week brought together in the U.S. fairly full eyewitness and photographic data on the butchery and rape which reigned in Nanking for over a month after this capital of China fell. There has been the most drastic shakeup by Tokyo of officers whose Japanese soldiers went berserk in Nanking. Even long-eared General Iwane Matsui, the Commander-in-Chief of the victorious Japanese offensive, has been recalled to Japan.

A typical and horrifying case history is that of a young Chinese girl brought in a basket litter on January 26 to the Mission hospital in Nanking. She said that her husband, a Chinese policeman, was seized by one of the Japanese execution squads on the same day that she was taken by Japanese soldiers from a hut in the Safety Zone to the South City. She was kept there for 38 days, she said, and attacked by Japanese soldiers from five to ten times each day.

Since many of the women raped were killed and buried indiscriminately with Chinese civilians, police and soldiers dispatched by the Japanese execution squads, there are no reliable statistics, but last week every white authority agreed that modern history does not afford another instance of such wholesale rape.

Robbery and looting also flourished in Nanking for many weeks. The number of Chinese executed, not killed in battle, totals by the most conservative Nanking estimates 20,000. Excerpt from a Nanking letter written at the worst period: "One [Chinese] boy of seventeen came in with the tale of about 10,000 Chinese men between the ages of 15 and 30 who were led out of the city on the 14th [of January] to the river bank near the ferry wharf. There the Japanese opened up on them with field guns, hand grenades and machine guns. Most of them were then pushed into the river, some were burned in huge piles, and three managed to escape. Of the 10,000 the boy figured there were about 6,000 ex-soldiers and 4,000 civilians.

[By the end of the war's first year, the Japanese occupied 400,000 sq. mi. of China, including all or part of twelve provinces, both of China's capital cities, Peking and Nanking, and nearly all of its major ports. The Chinese government had retreated up the Yangtze River to the gorges and mountains of Chungking, in Szechwan province. The Japanese had killed or wounded an estimated 1,300,000 Chinese at a cost of 300,000 Japanese casualties. But the duration and cost of the war, some $4,000,000 a day, was a heavy burden on a country that had anticipated only a three-month romp through the countryside. Furthermore, between Chiang's scorched-earth policy for captured Chinese cities, and harassment by Mao's guerrillas, who had seeped in thousands behind enemy lines, the Japanese were deriving little economic benefit from the occupation.]