by Toland, John
With the help of a highly connected journalist and an artist turned Communist, Sorge answered all these questions, as well as observing that the 2/26 Incident would result in either social reforms or a policy of permanent expansion. And expansion would go in the direction of China. He was careful to be circumspect and objective, since he was aware that unlike Berlin and Washington, “Moscow knew China and Japan too well to be fooled easily.”
To this day a number of informed Japanese believe the meeting was inspired by Communist agents. They claim that General Mazaki secretly conferred with left-wing leaders prior to the rebellion, and point out that not only the young officers but Ikki Kita and other civilian nationalists were unwitting tools of the Communists, whose plan it was to communize Japan through the action of idealists who preached socialism and the Imperial Way simultaneously. Realizing the power of emperor worship, the Communists intended to utilize the imperial system, not do away with it. This theory was somewhat shared by Sorge himself, who later told a friend that Japanese Communists may have had some connection with the uprising and that it was possible to have a Communist Japan ruled by an emperor.
2
To the Marco Polo Bridge
1.
Uneasy relief hung over the five million people of Tokyo, as it had after the great earthquake of 1923. During the mutiny they had shown little sympathy for the young rebels. For the first time public condemnation of mutineers was almost unanimous and there was criticism of the unruly streak running throughout the Army.
At the time of the 5/15 Incident the people had been confident that the militarists and nationalists would smash corrupt party politics and right social wrongs by direct acts of force. But corruption and social injustice had persisted and now, after the past four wild days, the public had lost its blind faith in force and wanted a return to orderly ways—at almost any cost.
And although every performance at the Kabuki Theater of that paean to revenge, violence and bloody self-sacrifice, The Forty-seven Ronin, was still packed, there was increasing support for the group in the Army that seemed the answer to chaos—the Control clique. Its very name stood for the need of the hour, discipline, even though what it really advocated was control of China. Civilian leaders, swayed by this same desire for law and order, began a move to crush the Imperial Way clique; and inadvertently jarred open the door to the gradual weakening of their own power by the military.
On the surface it looked as if the civilians had won new power when a new cabinet was formed by Foreign Minister Koki Hirota. Ambassador Grew informed the State Department that Hirota would “curb the dangerous tendencies of the Army in China and Manchuria,” and wrote in his diary that he was pleased at the choice “because I believe that Hirota is a strong, safe man and that while he will have to play ball with the Army to a certain extent, I think that he will handle foreign affairs as wisely as they can be handled …”
Hirota made a promising start by selecting the openly pro-American diplomat Shigeru Yoshida as his foreign minister, but the Army’s protest was so violent that Hirota dropped him. This was only the first of a series of conciliatory moves, climaxed by the new Prime Minister’s acceptance of a demand that all future war ministers be approved by the Big Three of the Army. Apparently an innocent move, this return to the old system meant that the policies of the country were now at the mercy of the Army. If the military disapproved of a cabinet, the war minister could resign and the Big Three would simply refuse to approve anyone else, thereby bringing about the fall of the cabinet. The Army could then refuse to provide a minister until a cabinet to their liking was selected. It meant the voluntary abandonment of one of the last civilian controls over the affairs of state.
Although the Army leaders were gaining political control, this was not their primary goal. They were striving above all to prevent another “2/26.” They realized that no amount of discipline could control idealistic young officers passionately dedicated to wiping out poverty and corruption. The solution was to eradicate the causes of discontent, which could only be done by correcting what the insurgents considered to be the evils of free economy. Already the settlers of Manchuria were demanding that their planned economy, which had brought such rapid material progress, be applied to the homeland. But who would carry out such a sweeping economic reform? The capitalists were busy defending their interests, and their servants—the politicians—were not only unsuited for the job but had lost the confidence of the public. And since the Army could not openly enter into politics without being corrupted itself, there was but one course left: to “propel reform” without too much involvement.
To forestall public hostility, the Army leaders placed Araki, Mazaki and a dozen other generals sympathetic to the Imperial Way clique on the inactive list and transferred many of the younger officers to unimportant posts.*
Martial law, invoked during the rebellion, continued month after month, with the press rigidly controlled and voices of dissent silenced. The mutineers were tried swiftly and in private. Thirteen officers and four civilians, including Ikki Kita, were sentenced to death. On July 12 they were bound to racks, blindfolded, and their foreheads marked with bull’s-eyes. Lieutenant Takahashi, who had helped assassinate General Watanabe, sang a song before remarking, “Indeed, indeed, I hope the privileged classes will reflect upon their conduct and be more prudent.” One embittered young officer cried out, “O, people of Japan, don’t trust the Imperial Army!” Another shouted, “The people trust the Army! Don’t let the Russians beat us!” Almost all gave three banzai for His Majesty just before the shots rang out.
Even with the purge of Imperial Way officers, there was a small but influential group in Tokyo dedicated to their main principle—the end of expansion. Their leader was the man who had engineered the seizure of Manchuria, Kanji Ishihara. Now on the General Staff, he had become appalled by the results of his own deed. He had dreamed of a democratic Manchuria comprised of five nationalities, all living in harmony as well as providing a bulwark against Russian aggression. But this idealistic goal had degenerated into a determination by the Army leadership to use Manchuria as a base for a takeover of North China.
Soon after the execution of the mutineers, Ishihara secretly met with eleven other key officers from the War Ministry and Army General Staff at the Takara-tei restaurant in Tokyo. These men shared his fear of expansion into China and had convened to discuss what should be done.
Ishihara opened with a question: Why risk war with China when the most dangerous enemy was their traditional foe, Russia? Two wars at once would be suicidal to a Japan weak in heavy industries, he continued. Instead the nation should concentrate all its energies on expanding its productive power until it could compete with that of the Soviet Union. To attain self-sufficiency in heavy industry, Japan would have to develop the resources of Manchuria in a series of five-year programs, avoiding all conflicts with Russia and China. When Japanese industry reached its peak in 1952, then an all-out war could be waged with Russia—and won. This alone could save Japan, not the expansion policy of the Control clique which called for a push into China and perhaps Southeast Asia that had to result in war with Britain and America. If this happened, the only one to profit would be the real enemy, Russia. Ishihara added that the greatest danger to the nation lay not in Tokyo, with the hierarchy comprised of men open to reason and persuasion, but in Manchuria.
In that country, influential radicals in the Kwantung Army were already organizing unauthorized forays into North China. Their leader was Major General Kenji Doihara, much like Ishihara with the same brilliance, flamboyance and talent for intrigue. He had already been nicknamed “The Lawrence of Manchuria” by Western newsmen. The previous year he had gone alone into North China inveigling the war lords and officials of the northernmost five provinces to break away from China and form an autonomous government under the wing of the Imperial Japanese Army. Once Prime Minister Okada learned this, he had sent out word to check the impetuous Doihara. But he ignored Tokyo�
�as had Ishihara—and continued to plot so successfully that an autonomous government of sorts was set up. Opportunistic Japanese merchants flooded into North China under their slogan “Follow the Japanese Flag,” irritating Chinese merchants and stirring up anti-Japanese feeling all over China. Doihara claimed he had established the puppet regime merely as a buffer between Manchuria and China, but a few weeks later he brought in five thousand Japanese troops on the grounds that Japanese merchants needed protection from bandits.
Now Ishihara charged that this influx of troops was but the beginning of a mass raid into China and that Doihara’s buffer area was “a poisonous flower” which should be destroyed before it involved Japan in total war with Nationalist forces under Chiang Kai-shek. Both the Russians and the Chinese Communists were plotting to this end so they could step in once both sides were exhausted and establish a Red China.
Ishihara concluded that the best way to curb Doihara was to get back to their offices and advise their chiefs to remove Japanese troops from trouble spots in North China. One such was the ancient Marco Polo Bridge fifteen miles southwest of Peking.
Japanese troops had been stationed in the Peking area ever since an international expeditionary force—including European, American and Japanese troops—suppressed the bloody, xenophobic Boxer Rebellion in 1900. The next year the chastened Chinese signed the so-called Boxer Protocol allowing certain foreign powers to occupy key points near Peking “for the maintenance of open communications between the capital and the sea.”
With the Boxers crushed, China became even more of a plundering ground for Western imperialism, but the continued depredation of her resources at last stirred her people to revolt. Long ago Napoleon had sounded the warning that China was but a sleeping giant: “Let him sleep! For when he wakes he will move the world.”
In 1911 the collapse of the decadent Manchu Empire under the attacks of Dr. Sun Yat-sen, China’s first genuine nationalist, finally wakened the sleeping giant. At once the fledgling republic was besieged on all sides by local war lords hungry for spoils, and although Dr. Sun’s Kuomintang (National People’s Party) continued to gain support throughout the country, China was torn to pieces. Finally, after a dozen frustrating years of bloody conflict, Dr. Sun called for help from a country which was glad to oblige—the Soviet Union. Soon Canton was swarming with Communists offering advice on everything from mass propaganda to military tactics. The moving spirit behind the Kuomintang armies called himself Galen but was in truth a Soviet general named Bluecher; and the chief political adviser was a colorful man who had taught in a Chicago business college and was one of the Kremlin’s top political agitators, Michael Borodin. With their help the republic grew in power, and its armies, under an able young general, Chiang Kai-shek, crushed its war-lord foes and pushed north, capturing Shanghai and Nanking. But success brought a much greater problem, the rising power of Communism within the ranks of the Kuomintang itself. In 1927 Chiang, now Sun’s successor, concluded that continued help from Russia would lead to a Red China; he outlawed the Communists.† From that day until the 2/26 Incident a triple war raged through China. On Monday, Kuomintang troops fought war lords; on Tuesday, the two would unite to fight one of the growing Red armies; and on Wednesday, war lords and Communists would jointly fall upon Chiang Kai-shek.
This constant turmoil, along with the relentless surge of international Communism, alarmed Japanese military leaders. They were threatened from the north by Stalin’s bombers in Vladivostok, less than seven hundred miles from Tokyo, and from the west by the bourgeoning legions of the Chinese Communists under a determined peasant named Mao Tse-tung.‡
To the militarists, there was no choice but to consolidate Manchuria, which lay between the two threats, as a breakwater against Communism. Those in the Control clique further argued that Manchuria was not enough and North China should also be seized. A state of anarchy existed throughout that area, and the considerable Japanese interests there needed protection. The claim of anarchy was somewhat justified. According to the Survey by the Royal Institute of International Affairs, banditry was rampant but Communism itself had become “an organized and effective political power exercising exclusive administrative authority over large stretches of territory.” There were also indications that the Chinese Communists were in league with the Soviets. “The possibility that Chinese and Russian Communism might join hands was thus to be reckoned with if Chinese Communism were Communism in the Russian sense.”
Most of the world lived in terror of Communism, and it was not remarkable that the Control clique regarded its spread in China as Japan’s principal danger. For the Chinese Communists, unlike those in America and Europe, were not merely members of a party but actual rivals of the national government, with their own laws and sphere of action. Already large sections of China had been Sovietized, and Shanghai itself was a fount of Communist propaganda.
At this time Mao was declaring that his Red troops alone were fighting the Japanese, while Chiang was simply waging a “war of extermination” against Communism. “I solemnly declare here, in the name of the Chinese Soviet government,” he told Western newsmen, “that if Chiang Kai-shek’s army or any other army ceases hostilities against the Red Army, then the Chinese Soviet government will immediately order the Red Army to stop military action against them.… If Chiang Kai-shek really means to take up the struggle against Japan, then obviously the Chinese Soviet government will extend to him the hand of friendship on the field of battle against Japan.”
This call for a united front, which had originated in Moscow, failed to move Chiang, but one of his most important field commanders, Chang Hsueh-liang, was not so adamant and Mao decided to work through him. Chang was known as “the Young Marshal,” since his father was Old Marshal Chang Tso-lin, whose assassination had led to the Japanese occupation of Manchuria. Though the Young Marshal commanded the Northeastern Army, which had been ordered by the Kuomintang to wipe out all Red forces in North China, he had serious reservations about Chiang’s course; he had come to believe that those he was fighting were also patriots and perhaps both sides should unite against the Japanese.
In the fall of 1936 Mao sent his most able negotiator, Chou En-lai, to work out a truce with the Young Marshal. Chou was mild-mannered, soft-spoken, almost effeminate-looking, but it was he who had directed the gory massacres of anti-Communists in Shanghai in 1927. Like all good diplomats, he was blessed with endless patience. “No matter how angry I get,” said an old school friend named Han, “he always smiles and goes back over the same ground covered in our argument, only in a different way—different enough to make you feel as though he were presenting a new point.”
He met with Chang in a Catholic mission in Sian, a remote city in North China, and after admitting that Chiang Kai-shek was the logical leader against the Japanese, promised that the Red generals would serve under him. In return Chang would have to assure him that the Red troops get equal treatment with the Nationalists. In addition, Communists held in Nationalist prisons would be released, and the Communist party allowed to operate legally once Japan was defeated.
They signed a document listing these conditions and shook hands to seal the bargain. “Young Marshal, now that it is all settled,” said Chou, “I am ready to take orders from you this very moment.”
Chang replied coldly that they would both have to wait and take orders from Chiang Kai-shek.
“If you still have any doubt about the determination of my party to join in a united front against Japan,” said Chou, “I will gladly stay here in Sian with you as a hostage.”
Chang said this wouldn’t be necessary and that he was as determined as anyone to fight the Japanese—after all, he had a personal account to settle with them. Nevertheless, he was a soldier and must first attempt to persuade his superior, the Generalissimo, to accept the terms of the truce just signed.
But before such a meeting could take place, another of Chiang’s field commanders, General Yang Hu-cheng, an ex-bandit chief, c
onvinced the Young Marshal that the Generalissimo could only be made to co-operate with the Reds if he were kidnapped. Chiang was already on his way to Sian to confront Chang with evidence that the Young Marshal was being influenced by leftists and to warn him that “unless timely measures were taken, the situation could lead to rebellion.”
Although he had agreed to the kidnapping, the presence of Chiang Kai-shek in Sian weakened Chang’s resolve; he continued to vacillate until General Yang took matters in his own hands on the morning of December 12. He seized the Generalissimo and all troops in the area loyal to him. Chiang had been badly injured in a fall while trying to escape, but he was more composed than the Young Marshal when they came face to face. “Both for your own sake and for the sake of the nation, the only thing for you to do is to repent at once and send me back to Nanking,” he said. “You must not fall into the trap set by the Communists. Repent before it is too late.”
It took the sheepish Chang two days to get up his nerve to show his superior a proposed eight-point agreement similar to the one made with Chou. Once it was signed, Chang promised, the Generalissimo would be escorted back to the Nationalist capital.
“So long as I am a captive, there can be no discussion,” said Chiang. He dared the other to shoot him and went back to the Bible.
The distressed Chang turned to the Reds for help. When Chou arrived he praised Chang for his courage, scolded him for bungling the kidnapping and went in to see the prisoner. They knew each other well. Chou had once served under the Generalissimo at the Whampoa Military Academy, China’s West Point; here, with Chiang’s approval, he had set up a political-commissar system. What Chiang didn’t realize until too late was that most of the commissars selected were Communists.
