Was the goal of Japan to take over and control all of China in WWII?
I know they made great strides early on, but wouldn’t they eventually have failed due to overwhelming numbers?
Take over all of China? Yep. They had already done this with Korea, Formosa and nicely controlled a large chunk of China in Manchuria. So they thought it wasn’t a problem taking over the whole country.
The ROC government was horribly inept and corrupt. So that wasn’t going to cause much problem. And China was already falling into a warlord-oriented state anyway.
Plus, the smugness of the Japanese was astonishing. Of course they could defeat and control China! No problem.
China had been conquered and held by outside forces before: The Mongols and the Manchus. Why would most peasant Chinese care if the top guy was Manchu or Nipponese?
Especially since the Chinese would realize what a great benefit it was to be free of the yoke of Western Imperialism, and instead be incorporated into Japan’s Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere. :dubious:
Japan wanted to make China into a colony, the same way that European powers like Britain or France had colonies in India and Africa. Those countries managed to rule colonies that had larger populations than the home countries.
But Japan got into the Imperial game too late. The conditions for one country to turn other countries into its colonies no longer existed. Japan failed to turn China into its colony and the European powers would all lost their colonial empires with a few decades.
Also Mao, & his Communist insurgents fought them.
Which gave him lots of postwar street cred.
Officially Japan claimed to be there to support the ‘legitimate’ Reorganized National Government of the Republic of China, a collaborationist state in the Vichy mold (though it predated it) under the stewardship of former Kuomintang member Wang Jingwei, which on paper claimed to govern all of China (except Manchukuo, another puppet state in Manchuria).
As to why the Japanese got on so well and didn’t succumb to the vast Chinese superiority in numbers (roughly 70 million to China’s 500 million), well, Civil War (including a Civil War within one of the factions of the Civil War by the aforementioned Jingwei, Civil Warception) had been going on for ten years when Japan waded in and although officially presenting a ‘United Front’ against the Japanese neither side was too keen to blood themselves, preferring to let the other side pay the butcher’s bill and then finish them off when they’d got rid of the Japanese. In truth neither side was strong enough to expel the Japanese alone, in part as the Japanese had taken it upon themselves to occupy the most prosperous areas on the east coast, leaving the undeveloped rural areas unchanged from the late Qing era, some in near feudal arrangements under various semi-autonomous warlords.
*“The Japanese are a disease of the skin. The Communists are a disease of the heart”. * - Chiang Kai-shek
Wow, I didn’t realize how disorganized China was at that time. Ignorance fought.
If the British could take over and control India (population ratio in 1930 - 1:5.9), why could the Japanese not hope to take over and control China (population ratio in 1930 - 1:7.6)?
Most people know more about Hitler and his ideas about the conquests in Europe and assume that the same can be applied to Japan, where it can’t.
A couple of really common fallacies here. First, there was no “Japan” when it came to WWII. Unlike Nazi Germany which had one dictator running the show, Japan was a collection of competing factions, many of whom only barely talked to each other.
Not only did the Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) and (IJN) failed to cooperate most of the time, the chiefs of staff of the respective services were independent of the war (army) and navy ministries and all four of those each independently nominally reported to the Emperor who was constitutionally charged with accepting the advice of his counsel, but not to provide it.
Many of the decisions were being made on the ground by generals in the field and not by HQ and certainly not by the ministry, let alone the cabinet.
Japan sort of wandered into the war with China. Their original intent was the maintain Manchuria as a colony / client state, but the Chinese failed to cooperate. The decision to attack them was lead by the generals in the field and the people back in Tokyo sort of went along without making grand plans on how to effect this. The IJA and IJN competed by having various sectors of responsibility.
How do other countries get into quagmires? The US has certainly seen it’s much easier to get involved in wars in Vietnam, Iraq or Afghanistan, for example, than it is to “win” them, for whatever that would have meant.
Not only that, but also the Strike North faction of the IJA thought that they could take on the Soviets in Siberia while the Strike South faction thought they could take Indochina all as well.
“Smug” fails to express the incredible hubris of the IJA of the late '30s and early '40.
Plus in the 1920s China had no real reliable central government, with de facto rule by various warlords. The ROC government didn’t as much defeat the warlords as co-opt them, and the government had a well-earned reputation for incompetence and corruption. (A lot of Allied aid during WW2 ended up either in black market hands or stockpiled by Chiang for future use against the Communists). There were even multiple times in the war it seemed Chiang and the Communists would break out into war against each other.
I wouldn’t just say it was “smug”, it was basically their version of “manifest destiny” and racial superiority. The japanese race was obviously superior to all the other asian races, so why would they have a problem conquering them?
WW2 in China WAS a 3-sided war.
Which bumped into the American, British and French ideas of who was allowed empires and domination over other countries and who wasn’t. One of the IMHO, not illegitimate complaints by the Japanese was that the European countries and to a certain degree America had been allowed to carve up the world and they were simply late in the game. Of course, this didn’t give them justification to create their own empire. The Western powers were wrong when they did it and the Japanese, Italians and Germans were wrong for starting wars to attempt to copy them.
The Japanese did not consider themselves as really Asians, but rather Japanese.
Whatever you want to call it, the IJA hubris extended to the Soviets and the Western Allies as well, so it wasn’t simply their superiority over (other) Asians, it was their moral superiority over all other humans which would allow them to conquer whatever they wanted.
However, to be fair to them, the typical thinking by the Western Powers was
That hubris got the Americans and British into enormous problems in 1941 and early '42 until they learned they should have taken the threat a little more seriously.
I remember reading on another forum by a historian that if somehow Japan didn’t get involved in a war with the Western Allies (though highly improbable by the way since they basically assumed at some point they would have to face Britain and the US) Japan would have basically held onto most of China well until the late 70’s when the occupation would have basically bankrupted Japan.
I expect the Soviets could have expelled them any time they took a notion to do so – see the Battle of Khalkhin Gol.
In practice, Japan retained control of the (relatively rich) coastal areas for most of the war, and (especially later in the war) conducted so-called “rice offensives” into the rice-growing areas around harvest time, to seize as much food as possible.
An interesting speculation is what would have happened if the Japanese had not involve the US by attacking Pearl Harbor? I presume the logic was that as soon as they started action against European holdings, especially British, it was only a matter of time before somehow the US jumped in. They needed the resources in those areas (i.e. oil from Indonesia). Pearl Harbor was a pre-emptive strike to warn off the US and/or buy time, which didn’t have the desired result. Besides, the US position in the Philippines would otherwise be a strategically located future threat if they left it alone to avoid dragging the US into the war.
Perhaps beating the Russians in 1905 helped overinflate Japan’s ego?
The example of the Soviets quickly defeating the IJA in all of Manchuria exists in actual history: in the Soviet ‘August Storm’ offensive of August 1945. However at that time the IJA force in Manchuria was greatly ‘hollowed out’, though still impressive in raw number of soldiers, by the Pacific War. Whereas the Soviets were for the time being freed from serious military threats elsewhere, plus the Red Army had been enormously strengthened, despite its terrible losses, both qualitatively and quantitatively by the Great Patriotic War, not to mention US Lend Lease aid (which was relatively more of a factor specifically in equipping and supplying the Soviet forces in the Far East for the 1945 offensive against Japan than it was in the 1941-45 Soviet effort overall).
OTOH in 1939 when a much smaller IJA force was defeated in the border dispute in western Manchuria, the Soviets had a lot more potential strategic worries, and opportunities for their own revanchist conquests (the Baltics, parts of Finland and Poland, as happened), in the west. And in the tougher subsequent campaigns against Finland then the Germans, the Red Army proved to have been more qualitatively damaged by Stalin’s purges than appeared in the one-sided mechanized operations against the Japanese in the latter part of the Nomonhan campaign (Soviet forces didn’t perform particularly well at first there either).
And for awhile in between the Kwantung Army (the IJA force in Manchuria) was greatly built up in numbers compared to 1939 while the Soviets had a war with Germany on their hands. The IJA in fact lobbied hard to attack the Soviet Far East in the wake of the German attack on the USSR in June 1941, and were allowed by the govt to make the initial preparations for a 20+ division offensive from eastern Manchuria into the Soviet Far East (as opposed to one and elements of another IJA division crushed in far western Manchuria in the Nomonhan Incident). That plan was only definitely cancelled that August in favor of the ‘go south’ plan against the Anglo-US-Dutch.
So depends somewhat on when, but in a vacuum sure the Soviet Union had superior military potential on the Asian mainland to Japan. Russia also did in 1905, and it was in Japan’s interest to quit while it was ahead in that war basically before an inevitable defeat to Russian numbers somewhere in the interior of Manchuria or Russia itself if they’d kept pushing beyond their land victories in southern Manchuria, even besides running out of money to continue the war.
On the Japanese in China separate from the Russians, they did (and still do to some degree) tend to look at it in from a different perspective than Westerners, and not only in terms of Japanese chauvinism though that’s also true. Japanese were and are more likely to look at their actions in China in comparison to Western intervention and colonialism from some decades before theirs, especially British, a comparison Westerners and especially British are likely to discount.
Britain had a far smaller population than India and subdued it, working in many cases with local powers, which aren’t by convention called ‘puppets’ but somewhat similar to Chinese puppet armies/govts aligned with Japan in 1931-45. Moreover Britain accomplished its goals in China at times with outright war against the nominal Chinese govt, and that happened to a lesser extent eg. with France’s war with China in the 1880’s (on land mainly in Vietnam though naval actions and landings against China proper) and the Boxer Rebellion.
Comparative morality and details of atrocities aside, it wasn’t implausible on its face to assume that aggression in China short of defeating coherent opposing forces in every corner of the country could lead to a position where the outsider power’s goal of dominance was still achieved. The Japanese didn’t enter the China ‘Incident’ of 1937 expected to have to occupy the whole country, which of course they never nearly did nor ever planned on a military operational/tactical level to do, even later on*. They expected to achieve their goal of de facto dominance over China without having to. Although it’s very true they just fumbled around for some years between ca. 1938 and the Pacific War after it became apparent that wasn’t working. And the Nationalists and Communists were definitely not going to give up after December 1941 if Japan couldn’t defeat the US first.
*they raided or conquered additional parts of China post 1938 mainly to try to destroy the Nationalist Army, short term goals like gathering food, to hinder resupply to China from overseas (via Burma etc) and then in their largest additional post 1938 conquests in 1944-45 to try to relieve the US threat to Japan’s sea lanes by opening a direct rail link to SE Asia as well as trying to eliminate USAAF bases in China from which a/c could reach Japan.
I don’t believe they expected to conquer China - even the deluded leaders realized that it was huge and contained rather a lot of people. But they were convinced that their culture, economy and race was inherently superior and better. I believe they thought that a) “corrupt, old, decadent” Chinese forces would quickly crumble, which would give them the opportunity to rule at least the entire sea board which b) would lead to the rest of China fawning over their strong leadership and whatnot, and henceforth beg to be lorded over.
But then again, asking that question might be the wrong point of view. Japan saw itself as the sole Asian equivalent and rival of the Western powers that had made China their bitch in the previous century. What they wanted wasn’t to take China for themselves or long term occupation (barring Mandchuria), it was really to evict the Euros from the whole Asian sphere the better to establish the same kind of protectorate slash rapey free-for-all the latter had had. No European power ever conquered China, but for most of the XIXth and early XXth century it was in their collective pocket to be sure.