Sino-Japanese Conflict

Despite the fact that Marco Polo and the Qing Emperor Qianlong both did their best to make the bridge famous, it is perhaps best known for the "Marco Polo Bridge Incident". On July 7, 1937, Japanese troops illegally occupied a railway junction near Wanping and fighting erupted. This is considered by many to be the date that China entered WWII.

An incident at the Marco Polo Bridge near Beijing on July 7, 1937, marked the beginning of the Sino-Japanese War.

Japanese militarists engineered the Mukden Incident of September 18, 1931, and occupied natural resource-rich Manchuria in the northeast. Further acts of Japanese aggression followed, finally culminating in the Marco Polo Bridge Incident of July 7, 1937, and the outbreak of an all-out war between China and Japan.

The conflict unfolded in three stages: a first stage of undeclared war beginning with the Marco Polo Bridge Incident; an intermediate stage beginning in late 1938; and a third stage involving a Chinese alliance with Allied Forces following the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor and ending with Japan's surrender in 1945. On the eve of the war, China's 1.7 million soldiers were pitted against a well-armed and ambitious Japanese force of more than 4.5 million.

One of the worst atrocities of the Second World War was the Nanjing Massacre (December 1937 - January 1938) when Japanese troops killed, raped, and looted in the city of Nanjing. Estimates of deaths number in the hundreds of thousands.

During the first stage of the war, Japan won successive victories. In 1937, Tianjin was occupied in July, Beijing in August, and Shanghai on November 11. The capital of Nanjing fell in December. Occupying forces of the Japanese Imperial Army in Nanjing massacred over 300,000 defenseless citizens and raped and tortured thousands more in the succeeding seven weeks of terror. With the loss of its capital, the ROC government moved deep into China's mountainous interior to Chongqing, Sichuan. By the end of this phase of the war, China had lost the best of its modern armies, air force, and arsenals; most of China's modern industries and railways; its major tax resources; and all ports through which military equipment and civilian supplies might be imported.

Japan ruled northeast and eastern China by stationing troops along major rail lines and through the troops of four puppet governments: Manchuria, Inner Mongolia, a "Provisional Government" in Beijing, and a government in Nanjing under Wang Ching-wei (controlling central China). These governments were merely cosmetic and received no support from the populace. Hundreds of thousands of patriotic Chinese continued to attempt the difficult trek to Chongqing. Students and faculties from most colleges in eastern China traveled by foot to makeshift quarters in distant inland towns. Factories and a skilled workforce were re-established in the western part of the country.

The government rebuilt its scattered armies and tried to purchase supplies from abroad, but the supply lines were long and precarious. When war broke out in Europe, shipments became scarcer. After Germany's conquest of France in the spring of 1940, Britain bowed to Japanese demands and temporarily closed the supply line to Kunming in China's Southwest. While Japan had more than 1,000 planes, China had only 37 fighter planes and 31 Russian bombers that were not equipped for night flying. The United States, however, had contracted with the Chinese government to sell 100 P-40 fighter planes--the beginning of an American effort to provide air protection to the ROC.

By the summer of 1941, the United States knew that Japan was preparing for a southward advance toward British Malaya and the Dutch Indies at the risk of war with the US and Britain. On July 23, 1941, US President Roosevelt approved a shipment of arms and equipment to China, along with a military advisory mission. By December 1941, the United States had implicitly agreed to help create a modern Chinese air force, maintain an efficient supply line into China, and arm 30 divisions of soldiers. The underlying goal was to revitalize China's war effort as a deterrent to Japanese military and naval operations in the south. The logistics line for all foreign aid depended on the 715-mile Burma Road, which extended from Chongqing to the town of Lashio, the Burmese terminus of the railway and highway leading to Rangoon.

The third phase of the war began on December 7, 1941, when the Japanese bombed the American naval base at Pearl Harbor. A few hours later, Japanese planes flew from their bases in Taiwan to bomb US military facilities at Clark Field in the Philippines. These actions resulted in declarations of war on Japan by both the US and Britain. With the Japanese conquest of Hong Kong on December 25, 1941, China lost its air link to the outside world and one of its principal routes for shipping supplies. By the end of May 1942, the Japanese held most of Burma, and China was almost completely blockaded.

On August 6, 1945, the US dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima and another on Nagasaki three days later, causing the Japanese to surrender on August 14. Japanese armies on the Chinese mainland surrendered to the ROC government on September 9, 1945, in Nanjing.

An estimated 20 million Chinese died in the war, and over 100 million people were uprooted from their homes.