Keep in mind outsider armies were used to the idea that you can venture into China and just beat Chinese rifles and swords-armed mobs up. Eventually, the emperor would agree to an unfair treaty.
The Japanese were the unlucky ones who learned that this had changed. It could just as well have been the Brits, French or Americans.
Being Japanese, they did probably not want to look inferior to the Europeans who had demonstrated Chinese defencelessness conclusively, after all!
This might be a frequently overlooked aspect if you use the gift of hindsight. Well spotted.Originally Posted by Fuchs
BTW a current graphic mapping the population density of China:
The Japanese certainly controlled at least nominally a large percentage of Chinese population.
Last edited by Firn; 11-13-2012 at 10:42 PM.
... "We need officers capable of following systematically the path of logical argument to its conclusion, with disciplined intellect, strong in character and nerve to execute what the intellect dictates"
General Ludwig Beck (1880-1944);
Speech at the Kriegsakademie, 1935
Fuchs:
The Chinese fought and fought and never gave up but it didn't make any difference against the Japanese. The Japanese lost China because of what happened in the Pacific, not because of anything that happened in China nor anything the Chinese did.
"We fight, get beat, rise, and fight again." Gen. Nathanael Greene
Well I would not say 'any difference'.
Strength
CHINESE
5,600,000
3,600 Soviets (1937–40)
900 US aircraft (1942–45)[1]
JAPANESE
3,900,000[2]
900,000 Chinese collaborators[3]
Casualties and losses
CHINESE
Nationalist: 1,320,000 KIA, 1,797,000 WIA, 120,000 MIA, and 17,000,000–22,000,000 civilians dead [4]
Communist: 500,000 KIA and WIA.
JAPANESE
Contemporary studies: 1,055,000 dead
1,172,200 injured
Total: 2,227,200[5]
Japanese estimates—including 480,000 dead in total
I think it is all to easy to fall into the mental trap of equating the (reveived) media coverage and the importance of an event. There is no doubt that the Japanese had allocated vast ressources of men and material to the Cinese theater of war. Especially Japanese man-power was in massively engaged.
While obviously the Chinese did not play the Soviet part in the Japense downfall there are some interesting parallels with the German effort in the East. And in both instances the war against the 'Western Allies' demanded a far more capital and technology intensive approach. In the German case the contrast was arguably not as extreme and thus the ressource drain had greater consequences on it's Eastern front.
Note: It is too easy to forget just how costly a big small war can be on your territory. 20 million dead civilians are clear reminder, especially since the war was concentrated mostly in areas of the North-east.
Last edited by Firn; 11-14-2012 at 11:59 AM.
... "We need officers capable of following systematically the path of logical argument to its conclusion, with disciplined intellect, strong in character and nerve to execute what the intellect dictates"
General Ludwig Beck (1880-1944);
Speech at the Kriegsakademie, 1935
Firn:
Small difference then, if that is more acceptable. The Japanese Army was never in any danger at all of being pushed out of China by the Chinese. They left because they lost in the Pacific. They didn't lose in the Pacific because of any lack of manpower, those islands are only so big. They lost in the Pacific because our naval/air forces beat theirs. That is the tragedy of the thing, the Chinese tried so hard and lost so much for so long but it didn't do much to remove the Japanese.
"We fight, get beat, rise, and fight again." Gen. Nathanael Greene
I think that this aspect of war is often lost in peacetime, especially among the civilian leadership. The US could work with pretty long levers when it came to raw materials, industrial might and technology and not only in the military sector of the economy. In farming the differences between the US and Germany were arguably most pronounced with Japan having an even more (wo)men-power intensive agricultural sector. All this meant a big downstream support advantage for the tip of the spear.
For those who fought war is never cheap but a rough look at the casualities suffered by the US and China in their struggle against Japan shows that the share of the human burden, especially the dying part, quite loopsided. Of course dying alone has never won a war.
Last edited by Firn; 11-14-2012 at 05:47 PM.
... "We need officers capable of following systematically the path of logical argument to its conclusion, with disciplined intellect, strong in character and nerve to execute what the intellect dictates"
General Ludwig Beck (1880-1944);
Speech at the Kriegsakademie, 1935
No wonder if you wage war like this.
Firn,
Two good maps. Is there one showing how far the Japanese expanded? In 1940 IIRC they occupied northern and then southern (Vichy) French Indo-China; my recollection is that the Japanese were by then on the land border.
More generally and I rely on a conversation with Professor Steven Tsang, a British academic whose life target is to complete a biography of Chiang Kai-Shek.
The Nationalists lost their best divisions, first the German-trained divisions in 1940 that tried to hold onto Shanghai (August to November 1937) and when they were reformed and re-equipped they were sent south to Yunnan, to help the Allies in Burma and re-opened 'The Burma Road' (December 1941-late 1944). Steven remarked that these divisions could ably resist their opponents - if Japanese air power was absent.
Wiki links:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Sino-Japanese_War and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Shanghai
davidbfpo
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