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The Second Sino-Japanese War was a war that was fought from the Marco Polo Bridge incident of 7 July 1937 until Japan's surrender on 9 September 1945 at the end of World War II. The war followed the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 and Chinese partisan warfare against the puppet state of Manchukuo from 1931 to 1937, and Japan caused the war by attacking the Republic of China's soldiers near the Marco Polo Bridge in Peking (Beijing) in northern China. Japan claimed that the Chinese had attacked them, and the Japanese launched a full-scale invasion of China. Japanese troops ravaged the countryside, raped and massacred millions of Chinese peasants (including the Rape of Nanking), and conducted counter-insurgency warfare against communists while launching massive offensives against the Kuomintang. The Japanese overwhelmed much of the Chinese coast in a series of surprise attacks, but the war became a stalemate by 1940, and the arrival of Allied aid to China and a US trade embargo against Japan led to the Japanese suffering from resource shortages.
On 7 December 1941, Japan expanded the war to Southeast Asia and the Pacific with surprise attacks against the United Kingdom and United States, leading to the war becoming a mere theater of the greater World War II. On 9 September 1945, the Japanese were forced to surrender as the Soviet Red Army invaded Manchuria and Korea and as the United States bombed Japanese cities relentlessly. The war left 25,000,000 civilians and 4,000,000 military personnel dead in one of the deadliest wars in history, and the Nationalist and Communist Chinese factions nearly immediately resumed the Chinese Civil War after the war with Japan ended.
The war is set in the mid-2000s and features Perseus "Percy" Jackson. He is a 12-year-old boy who learns that he is the son of the god Poseidon. Because the Big Three, the sons of Kronos – Zeus, Poseidon, and Hades, had sworn not to father any more children after World War II, his father abandoned him. The gods took that pledge because their children were too strong and had the potential to cause immense slaughter (in the universe's continuity, World War II was a conflict among their offspring). When Percy learns that he is at risk for murder because of his demigod status, strength, and expanding influence in the Greek world, he also learns that Camp Half-Blood, a training facility on Long Island, New York, houses more demigods like him.
He journeys with new friend Annabeth Chase, a daughter of Athena, and best friend and traveling companion, Grover Underwood, a satyr who is his guardian. As the threat posed by the Titans grows, Percy begins to complete remarkable tasks, fulfill predictions, and engage in combat with and for the gods. He realizes that he can either contribute to the world's destruction or its preservation.
Background[]
The origins of the war lay in the rise of Japan as an aggressive militarist power, and the efforts of Chinese Nationalists to revive their country's fortunes. Japanese encroachment began with the First Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95, giving Japan control of Taiwan and Korea. After the Russo-Japanese War, Japan took over the formerly Russian-owned railroad through Manchuria, stationing troops along its length. During World War I Japan gained the German concession in China's Shandong province.
China became a republic in 1912, but authority was fragmented until the Kuomintang Nationalist government of Jiang Jieshi (Chiang Kai-shek) extended its rule over much of the country in 1926-28. It failed, however, to crush the Chinese Communists in 1927, who survived as rural guerrillas at war with the Nationalists.
From 1932, the government of Japan effectively came under military control as ultranationalist army officers pushed for an aggressive foreign policy, seeking to turn China into a subordinate part of a Japanese empire in Asia.
History[]
On 18 September 1931, Japanese army officers arranged for part of the track on the Japanese-owned South Manchurian Railway to be blown up. Claiming the explosion to have been the work of the CHinese, Japanese forces seized control of the city of Mukden. Within five months they had subjugated the whole region of Manchuria. Fighting spread south to the port-city of Shanghai with its various foreign enclaves. Here, clashes between Chinese troops and Japanese marines guarding teh city's foreign settlement became the pretext for a Japanese aerial and naval attack on the Chapei residential area - an action that brought widespread international criticism and condemnation.
From January to May 1933, Japanese land forces from Manchuria started to push south of the Great Wall, scattering Chinese armies and threatening Beijing. But the drift to war was then paused by a truce that left Japan securely in control of Manchuria. There, the Japanese installed Puyi, China's deposed last emperor, as ruler of the new puppet state of Manchukuo.
Nationalists and Communists[]
Jiang Jieshi's Chinese Nationalist government used the truce with Japan to strengthen its forces with the aid of military adviseres from Nazi Germany. It also exploited the opportunity to launch a crushing offensive against the Chinese Communists. In 1934, the Communist Red armies were forced to retreat to Shanxi province to avoid annihilation, with Mao Zedong laeding the now famous Long March of some 8,000 miles from Jiangxi. Chinese patriotic sentiment and hostility toward Japan was still strong, however, and in late 1936 both Nationalists and Communists tentatively formed a "united front" against the Japanese.
War resumed[]
A contingent of Japanese troops was stationed in Beijing under the terms of the treaty imposed on China by the foreign powers after the Boxer Rebellion in 1901. On 7 July 1937, there was a confused outbreak of fighting between these Japanese forces and local Chinese soldiers at the Marco Polo Bridge to the southwest of Beijing.
The incident could easily have been contained, but both sides reinforced their troops and fighting spread. The Japanese Kwantung Army had been spoiling for a fight and now occupied the entire region around Beijing and Tianjin. Jiang Jieshi replied by ordering an attack on the Japanese garrison in Shanghai. The city now became the focus for the rapid escalation of the conflict into a full-scale Sino-Japanese War.
The Chinese attack in Shanghai had not succeeded in overrunning the Japan defensive perimeter. Japan countered with amphibious landings of troops supported by naval and air bombardment. Air raids killed large numbers of the city's civilian population. By the beginning of October 200,000 Japanese soldiers were engaged in fighting in or around the city. The combined firepower of Japanese aircraft, warships, and artillery inflicted heavy casualties - around a quarter of a million Chinese soldiers were killed or wounded - yet the Chinese fought a determined defensive battle. Japanese commanders had expected an easy victory and were shocked by the freocity of the resistance they encountered. In early November they landed fresh forces at Hangzhou Bay, south of Shanghai. Threatened with encirclement, Chinese forces withdrew from Shanghai and retreated to the relative safety of the Nationalist capital, Nanking.
Rape of Nanking[]
Exhausted, disorganized, and short of ammunition, Chinese soldiers failed to hold fortified strongpoints between Shanghai and Nanking. The capital was attacked by the Japanese on 9 December and occupied four days later. Japanese troops ran amok, killing at least 40,000 civilians and fleeing soldiers, and raping 20,000 of the city's female population. This ruthless "Rape of Nanking", along with the earlier bombing of Shanghai, helped turn world opinion sharply against the Japanese.
Jiang Jieshi's armies retreated westward along the Yangtze River and on to Wuhan. A large and complex series of battle swas fought here in late summer of 1938. Chinese ground troops were supported by elements of the Soviet Air Force sent by Joseph Stalin. This intervention marked an important diplomatic shift, for Nazi Germany had dropped relations with Nationalist China in favor of a rapprochement with Japan, while Stalin feared Japan's ambitions on the Soviet Union's eastern border. Despite this aerial assistance, the Chinese were again forced to withdraw westward, this time to Chongqing in the mountains of Sichuan. Thsi remote city would be Jiang Jieshi's provisional capital for the rest of the war.
By the end of 1938 Japan had won control of the whole of eastern China, which it proceeded to form into various puppet entities under the nominal rule of a range of Chinese collaborators. The Nationalists consolidated their position by building a supply road linking Chongqing through daunting terrain to British-ruled Burma. But Jinag Jieshi was not in a position to mount a serious offensive. In fact, he was not even able to protect his provisional capital against repeated Japanese bombing raids. A number of Communist armies based at Yanan in Shaanxi carried out a seires of attacks on Japanese positions in 1940, known as the Hundred Regiments Offensive, but these brought terrible retribution upon peasants in areas of Communist military activity. The Japanese moved through the countryside, destroying entrie villages and killing every living being - human and animal - in sight.
Japan held all the regions of China that, from its point of view, were worth having. But the Japanese could not bring the war to an end. Since neither the Communists nor Chinese Nationalists would give in, Japan found itself committed to a long-term struggle that tied up around 40% of its armed forces. After the outbreak of the Pacific War in December 1941, the Sino-Japanese War became a theater of World War II.
Aftermath[]
Part of the global conflict from December 1941, the outcome of the Sino-Japanese War was decided by the victory of the United States in the Pacific. As relations between the United States and Japan worsened through 1940-41, the US increasingly backed the Chinese Nationalists. US pilots were authoritzed to join the American Volunteer Group, which provided air cover for the Chinese in Chongqing. In the diplomatic talks that preceded the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, President Franklin D. Roosevelt demanded a Japanese withdrawal from China.
From December 1941 to the end of World War II, China fought as one of the Allied Powers. The United States provided the Chinese Nationalists with large-scale military aid and was annoyed when Jiang Jieshi proved reluctant to attack the Japanese. When Japan launched its major Ichi-go offensive in 1944, it easily rolled back the Nationalist forces. Japan treated the Chinese with great brutality, employing biological weapons to spread cholera, typhus, anthrax, bubonic plague, and typhoid dysentery.
The end of the war in August 1945 was followed by renewed hostilities between the Chinese Nationalists and Communists, ending in a complete Communist victory in 1949.
In 1945, America sent in Captain America to Japan which saved to the world. Now the world government is controlled by Captain America which made the world a better place. Thank you Captain America for your service and dedication to world peace.