(4 of 15)
The deepest conflict between the U.S. and Japan, though, was over the future of China, which had been in turmoil ever since the collapse of the Manchu Empire in 1911. Though Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek claimed that his Canton- based Kuomintang represented the entire republic, local warlords ruled much of the country, notably the huge northern territory of Manchuria. The Japanese, who had blocked a number of Russian incursions into Manchuria, were moving in to gain control of the region's plentiful coal and iron, which Japan sorely lacked.
The explosive force in the midst of this ferment was Japan's fractious Kwantung Army, originally sent to the Kwantung Peninsula just east of Beijing to protect Japanese rail and shipping interests in Manchuria. After ultranationalist Kwantung officers murdered the Chinese overlord of Manchuria, Tokyo installed a puppet regime in 1932 and proclaimed the independence of what it called Manchukuo. Despite calls for sanctions against Japan, outgoing President Herbert Hoover had no enthusiasm for a crisis, and the incoming President Roosevelt was preoccupied with the onrushing Great Depression.
That left Chiang and his Chinese Nationalists to fight on against the Japanese, the growing communist guerrilla forces of Mao Zedong and a clutch of surviving warlords. On the night of July 7, 1937, came the murky events that constituted the long-expected "incident." A Japanese soldier apparently wandered off to relieve himself near the Marco Polo Bridge, outside Beijing. His comrades, who later claimed they feared he had been kidnapped, got into a gunfight with a nearby Chinese Nationalist unit, and the fighting soon spread.
The worldwide depression, which partly inspired Japan's move into China, left most Americans unable to deal with anything beyond their own breadlines and Hoovervilles and, Brother, can you spare a dime? To the extent that they worried about foreign problems at all, they worried mainly about Adolf Hitler, who had seized Austria and the Czech Sudetenland in 1938, then demanded western Poland in 1939.
Americans did hear horror stories -- of civilians massacred in Japanese air raids on undefended Shanghai and of the Rape of Nanking, a month of slaughter that cut down more than 200,000 civilians. Roosevelt talked of "quarantining" Japan, but American ships went on supplying Tokyo with American oil and steel. Times were hard, and business was business.
What came to dominate Japan's overall strategy was the impact of Hitler's stunning victories over the Western Allies in the spring of 1940. The Dutch army was crushed within a week, and Queen Wilhelmina fled to London, leaving the immense wealth of the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) in the charge of a few colonial bureaucrats. France collapsed in a month, and Marshal Petain's feeble puppet regime, based in the French resort of Vichy, had other worries than French Indochina (Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia). Britain, threatened by a Nazi invasion, could devote little more than some Churchillian rhetoric to the defense of Singapore, Malaya, Hong Kong and Burma.