Season 15, Episode 6: The Great Withdrawal

The attempted coups which rocked the Empire of Japan in early 1932 were remarkable for their brutality but their lasting legacy would always be the spread of ultranationalist ideals from a radicalized few to the populace at large. The public trials of the plotters led many to agree with their logic over time, even if they couldn’t condone their methodology. After all, most Japanese people had been taught since they were young that Japan was a special country, chosen by the gods to protect east Asia under the guidance of their divine emperor. The Japanese economy had been on shaky ground since the 20s; the Great Depression caused devastation as unemployment skyrocketed, rural communities collapsed into poverty, and many of the elected government’s initial responses had only served to worsen the crisis. The only thing that did seem to be going well for Japan was its success in the recent military adventures in northeast China.

In many ways, the seeds of Japan’s militarism were sown during the Meiji Period, during which, you may recall, the government’s popular slogan was “Fukoku Kyohei,” meaning “rich nation, strong army.” By the early Showa period, it wasn’t unusual for the average Japanese person to link those two factors as mutual dependencies in their idea of national success. Japan would be a rich country if it had a strong army, and conversely if Japan had a strong army, it would be a rich country. It wasn’t unusual for a Japanese citizen to blame their personal hardships and tragedies on government mismanagement, a critique which was not entirely wrong. However, it was becoming less and less common for everyday citizens to ever level criticism of the armed forces, which enjoyed significant public support buoyed by the popular media of the day.

While the assassins enjoyed newfound fame and light jail sentences, the government needed a new prime minister. Fearing future fascist coup attempts, the privy council and emperor needed a candidate who was neither too militant, which would only encourage more army adventures on the mainland, nor too liberal, which might invite another bloody round of assassinations and terror. They settled on Saito Makoto, a retired admiral and veteran of the First Sino-Japanese War who had served as Vice Minister of the Navy during the Russo-Japanese War. During his first stint as Governor-General of Korea starting in 1919, he had survived an assassination attempt and yet went on to loosen some of the restrictions set against ethnic Koreans to discourage the growth of Korean nationalism.

He seemed, to the privy council and emperor, to be a suitable candidate who could keep the ship of state on an even keel during a very robust storm season. However, shortly after taking office, the War Minister Sadao Araki immediately demanded funding increase and for the government to support the army’s efforts in northeast China. As 1932 progressed, Prime Minister Saito Araki found himself acquiescing to the military again and again as he tried to find ways to correct and expand Japan’s faltering economy.

On September 15, 1932, just four months after the assassination of Inukai Tsuyoshi, Japan and representatives from the new State of Manchuria signed a treaty which would later be known as the Japan-Manchukuo Protocol. The text of the document is almost farcical from its very beginning, in which (quote) “Japan recognizes the establishment of a free and independent Manchoukuo in accordance with the free will of its inhabitants.” (end quote) It also contained the official recognition which the Kwantung Army demanded, as well as a pledge of mutual peaceful cooperation between Japan and Manchuria against (quote) “common outside threats” (end quote). That commitment to mutual protection was used, within the text of the same treaty, as justification for the stationing of Japanese troops within Manchuria’s borders.

As we discussed in the previous episode, the Lytton Report was published a month later, and the international community mostly condemned Japan for its unwarranted aggression and cynical exploitation of self-defense as a justification for virtually annexing three of China’s provinces. However, the international community was far from being the bulwark against such authoritarian power-grabs which the League of Nations aspired to be. An unsettling transformation had been transpiring in the international community for some time, thanks to an emerging political philosophy which began in Italy.

Socialist journalist Benito Mussolini underwent a radical transformation during his years serving Italy during the first world war, emerging as a reactionary nationalist with a big idea. Convinced that socialism, as a governing philosophy, was doomed to failure, he posited that what Italy needed was violent national renewal which would revive the spirit of the Italians and rid their society of undesirable elements. To represent his emerging political philosophy, he chose an ancient Roman symbol of authority - an ax wrapped in a bundle of rods, which in Latin was called the “Fasces.” Thus fascism was born in 1919, when Mussolini formed the “Fasci Italiani di Combattimento,” or “Italian Fasces of Combat,” an activist group with a membership of around two hundred agitated Italians who were mad as hell and weren’t going to take it any more.

Like many political philosophies, Fascism did not arrive fully-formed and ready for prime time. Mussolini explained in a speech upon his organization’s founding that (quote) “we are libertarians above all, loving liberty for everyone, even for our enemies.” (end quote) Initially, they were broadly opposed to censorship, dictatorship, and militarism. However, their supposed love of liberty was outweighed by their hatred of socialism, and this political party soon adopted street-fighting, vandalism, and violent disruption at nearly every opportunity. Such anti-socialist organizations often attract members whose political philosophy is broadly conservative, and it did not take long before the Italian Fasces of Combat Party was advocating far-reaching measures to suppress and even eliminate socialist and communist organizing in Italy. The membership of Mussolini’s party included many veterans of the first world war, like himself, and many of those guys were, to put it mildly, some pretty scary dudes.

The existing government thought it might use this new movement as a wedge against the far left and in 1921 the fascists earned enough parliamentary seats in the election to form a coalition government alongside the Italian Liberal party, who also feared socialist power. In late October of 1922, thirty thousand members of the Fascist Party coalesced and marched on Rome, dressed in black military uniforms which earned them the nickname “blackshirts.” They demanded the resignation of sitting Prime Minister Luigi Facta, whom they perceived as being too liberal to lead Italy into the grand renewal of which their party leader so often spoke. The Prime Minister asked the King of Italy’s permission to declare martial law and have the military disburse the blackshirts. The King refused to do this, and the premier thus resigned shortly thereafter. For his new Prime Minister, King Victor Emmanuel III appointed Benito Mussolini, whom he hoped would restore order and bring peace to the land. Instead, Mussolini grabbed onto power in much the same manner a starving bulldog would latch onto a steak. In fairly short order, Mussolini used the secret police to spy on political opponents and pushed Italy into becoming a one-party state over which he intended to rule as a permanent dictator.

Meanwhile, in Germany, another veteran of the first world war was making waves on the political scene. Directly inspired by Mussolini’s march on Rome, Adolph Hitler first attempted to seize power through an event called “The Munich Beer Hall Putsch.” This effort resulted in a failure so thorough that Hitler himself, being pursued by police and fearing that he would soon be executed for treason, nearly committed suicide but was prevented by a friend. Unfortunately for the world, he lived to Putsch another day.

The judge who oversaw the prosecutions of those involved in the attempted coup was sympathetic to their rather extreme conservative leanings and let them off with light sentences. Though sentenced to five years in prison, Hitler himself was released after only nine months, having written what would become a best-selling memoir called “Mein Kampf,” which means “My Struggle.” Throughout the remainder of the 1920s, he decided to develop his following into a political party and seek power through legal means. The German Republic was in bad economic shape after the first world war and when the Great Depression began in 1929, it fell much further than many of its peer nations. Unemployment skyrocketed to around 30% and the government was forced to take drastic loans from the United States to ensure regular payments of their sizable war indemnity from the first world war.

Throughout this period, Hitler’s partisans were undertaking a combination of legitimate political activism and street fighting against communists, socialists, and other broadly leftist organizations. Meanwhile, France was urged to allow a temporary halt to all war reparations payments to give Germany a chance to find its feet in the midst of a credit crisis that arose because of the war payments. However, the French government announced that no such pause would be allowed and that Germany must continue to honor its obligation, in spite of the fact that France’s own economy had not been nearly as devastated as their peer nations. This is not to say that everything in France continued as normal - far from it - but it bears mentioning that unemployment in France never rose higher than 5% and that most of its troubles were from domestic economic matters like low population growth in the aftermath of the first world war and a rise in violent nationalist political movements similar to Mussolini’s and Hitler’s.

In 1933, the German government became deadlocked and President von Hindenburg - the same von Hindenburg who served as one of Germany’s principle generals in the first world war - decided to make a deal with the devil. He offered the chancellorship to Adolph Hitler, who gladly accepted, demanding two additional cabinet vacancies be filled by fellow members of his National Socialist Party, Nazi for short. He also demanded that parliament be dissolved and fresh elections held. It was von Hindenburg’s hope that he could keep Hitler on a leash and swing Germany’s right wing back into alignment with traditional conservatism rather than full-throated fascism. This would turn out to have been a terrible plan.

The elections of March 1933 were preceded by a crisis which presented an opportunity for the Nazi Party: the Reichstag Fire. Because Hitler was so quick to take advantage of the chaos that ensued after the burning of the Reichstag building, many observers at the time and many people still today are under the impression that it was a false flag attack; the Nazis must have set the fire themselves to create the very crisis they needed to seize power. However, most historians today who specialize in this period of history are convinced that a Dutch communist who was living in Berlin set the fire. Regardless of who burned what, Hitler demanded that a state of emergency be declared and that certain civil liberties be temporarily curtailed until the emergency had passed. Of course, those liberties would never be restored and instead, Hitler and his partisans would transform their nation into an ethnostate ruled by dictatorship.

In the Literary Digest History of the World War, Volume 6, the author quotes Prince Maximillian of Baden, who said, regarding the German revolution that occurred toward the end of that conflict, (quote) “The German people, by the formation of a popular government, had been liberated from the dictatorship of Ludendorf and would never tolerate another.” (end quote) Unfortunately for Prince Maximillian, dictatorship had once again come to Germany and would not be excised without a considerably greater expenditure of blood, terror, and misery than had been exacted previously.

In the midst of democracies collapsing along with the global economy, Japan’s power grab in northeast China was a headache for the League of Nations, whose official report demanded that the empire withdraw its troops and cease all efforts to forge a Manchurian nation independent of China. This was a critical moment for the League, which had been formed in the hope of creating an international liberal order in which the law was supreme, an alternative to the militaristic “might makes right” attitude which had led to so much bloodshed during the first world war. To the League, the matter was simple: Japan had violated international law in its invasion of northeast China.

To the government of Japan, the matter was complicated. Ordering a military withdrawal probably would have resulted in another wave of fascist violence against elected officials, possibly even a successful coup. They had also gone to great lengths to try and forge this new State of Manchuria along liberal political lines - forming a justice system based on an independent judiciary and with human rights enshrined front and center. Far from being an ethnostate purely for Manchu people alone, the propaganda around the new state was that it was a mutli-ethnic, pan-Asian nation which would be a symbol of a new dawn for east Asia, the beginning of a glorious new civilization.

In spite of furious construction of rail lines and other markers of modernity and industrialization, in February of 1933, the League of Nations officially endorsed the Lytton Report and expressed its intentions to enforce that report’s recommendations. Japan responded by withdrawing from the League of Nations.

Japan’s withdrawal was a big deal. It had been one of the founding members of the League and had often contributed to that organization’s peacemaking efforts. However, the League of Nations was not entirely powerless in the face of the empire’s naked aggression and violation of international law. This, combined with the trouble already brewing in Spain, gave rise to concern within the League of another impending international conflict on par with, or larger than, the first world war.

Beginning in February of 1932, the same month in which targeted political assassinations began in Japan, the League of Nations launched the Conference for the Reduction and Limitation of Armaments. The scope of this conference was ambitious: its lofty goals included attaching strict definitions to all weapons regarding whether they were strictly offensive, defensive, or some combination of both, the abolishment of air power and submarines, limiting the sizes of armies, and banning the manufacture of certain kinds of tanks. It was believed that by limiting the sizes of militaries and the relevant numbers of offensive and defensive weapons, future wars could be averted or at least the damage from them would be minimized.

The departure of Japan from the League of Nations included their withdrawal from the ongoing disarmament conference. Not long after Japan’s withdrawal, another nation decided it no longer had any use for the League of Nations: Nazi Germany. Shortly after Hitler’s power grab in 1933, Germany left the League of Nations and began rearming with alarming speed and efficiency. This rearmament was done in violation of the Treaty of Versailles, but once again the League had no effective enforcement mechanism to prevent this, and what few measures it did possess it seemed unwilling to deploy.

The only real tool left in the League of Nations’ belt to try and bring Japan and Germany back into alignment with the international community was economic sanctions. However, considering the terrible shape of the world economy, removing two nations from international trade would mean further job loss, industry collapse, banking crises, and general misery. Whether they would have employed such sanctions even during times of plenty is debatable: they certainly weren’t about to risk giving the global economy another gut punch only a few years after the initial shock.

Meanwhile, in northeast China, the people of the region who were supposedly clamoring to form their own independent nation were fiercely resisting Japanese occupation. Because of that region’s history, many peasant farmers were longtime members of well-established self-defense militias which had previously served to protect their villages from local bandits and other minor threats. These groups had, over time, formed networks across villages in different provinces, and enjoyed the association of brotherhood with their fellow members. The largest two were the Red Spear Society and the Big Swords Society. They were targeted by the Japanese occupiers and dismantled in pretty short order, but I include them because I think that we can all agree that their names were pretty awesome.

In spite of the repression which known members of these defensive brotherhoods experienced, many went into hiding and gradually formed offensive bands, usually composed of cavalry, who were capable of quick hit-and-run attacks and often employed their superior knowledge of local terrain to stage devastating ambushes before riding away and melting into the mountains.

A few former Fengtian Army officers refused to follow Zhang Xueliang’s order of non-resistance and tried to fight back, defending the city of Harbin from Japanese incursion and finding many ready volunteers among its populace. However, by the spring of 1932, this kind of resistance was at an end as its armies were defeated and its leaders arrested or killed. This left the irregular militias, who would soon prove that they might be more difficult to deal with than a regular standing army.

In February of 1932, Wang Delin, a former bandit who became an officer in Jilin Province, announced the formation of the Chinese People’s National Salvation Army, usually abbreviated NSA. He began with a force of 200 but it soon swelled to a thousand as local defensive brotherhoods and other volunteers flocked to his banner. They began their operations by systematically destroying the rail bridges which serviced the northern city of Dunhua, then successfully defeated the Japanese garrison stationed there.

The Imperial Japanese Army responded by sending an expedition force in March which threatened to retake Dunhua. However, using their superior local knowledge, the NSA successfully repelled this incursion through liberal application of ambush attacks and other irregular tactics. The expeditionary force withdrew to Harbin, which served to both demoralize Japanese soldiers in northeast China as well as draw even more fighters to Wang Delin’s banner - he now had over ten thousand under his command and was officially recognized as a general by Chinese General Li Du, who led his own volunteer force called the “Jilin Self-Defense Army.” It was a coalition that was not long for this world.

While they successfully defended against future Japanese incursions throughout 1932, the Jilin Self-Defense Army and the NSA began to fall out over issues of authority. Many Self-Defense Army officers tried to convince NSA officers to support folding the NSA into the Self-Defense Army, which led to disputes between them that sometimes turned into deadly incidents. By the end of 1932, they were no longer coordinating their actions and the Imperial Japanese Army found its footing in the region. By 1933, Japanese troops had all but eliminated these armies, the survivors of which formed small guerrilla bands which pursued an ongoing harassment campaign against the occupiers.

Meanwhile, the Conference for the Reduction and Limitation of Armaments would go on for another year, though without many measurable results. Nations which wanted to more heavily arm themselves did so without any consequence, and the League of Nations lost almost all of whatever credibility remained. Next time, we will continue discussing the International Realignment that occurred in the 1930s while keeping pace with the growing conflict between Japan and China, which would only grow worse when all pretense of democracy in the State of Manchuria would be swept away in favor of autocracy and oppression.