raharris1973
Well-known member
WI Second Sino-Japanese War was fought 4 years in advance? (starting in 1933 not 1937)
Scenario:
Instead of the Tanggu truce taking hold in May 1933 and leading to a lull in Japanese expansion for a few years and a de-escalation of Sino-Japanese fighting, confrontation and expansion escalate that summer and fall of 1933 to full-scale Sino-Japanese warfare.
The four year advance of the war provides an opportunity to test several hypotheses about the Sino-Japanese war and key trends in both countries during the 1930s, Japan’s wider policies, and other powers’ reactions to the Sino-Japanese war.
I will elaborate more on those later, but first I want to anchor us on the basic timeline of the second Sino-Japanese war from 1937 on, and apply it onto the somewhat different context of the earlier 1930s.
Now would all the outcomes of the battles and the schedules and intervals between them be the same? Now probably not. Odds would be some things would go differently.
But it is *not* enough to just say things would be different, throw your hands up, and stop there. This what-if invites the question of “how” things would go differently, to who’s relative advantage, Japanese, Chinese Nationalist or Chinese Communist. And, the timeline and military events of OTL’s Sino-Japanese war were shaped by broad Sino-Japanese national capabilities and geographic realities. So in my opinion, transposing the timeline of the 1937-1945 war onto the earlier starting time is still a decent place to start since it provides guideposts on deciding at what points in the struggle things would take a different direction from OTL in ways great or small.
So here’s the provisional timeline:
July 1933 - Equivalent of the Marco Polo Bridge incident happens, the incident in North China that gives the Japanese Army the excuse and motivation to do big operations in North China south of the Great Wall to grab a couple more provinces, but which forces the Chinese to resist on a national scale
Early August 1933 - Japanese complete conquest of Beijing and Tianjin, Nationalists, Communists and Warlords proclaim unified resistance under Jiang Jieshi
August 1933 - Japanese troops occupy Chahar province, eastern Inner Mongolia
August 13-Nov 20th 1933 - Japanese ultimately win the hard fought battle of Shanghai against Jiang’s central government troops
August-Nov 1933 - Japanese seize North China provinces advancing south along the Beijing-Wuhan and Tianjin-Pukou railway axes
Dec 1933 - Japanese seize the capital of Nanjing and commit massacre of civilians, Nationalist central government evacuates to Wuhan
June-October 1934 - Japanese conquest of Wuhan, Nationalist central government evacuates to Chongqing
October-December 1934 - Japanese conquest of Guangzhou
Feb 1935 - Japanese conquest of Hainan island
Sep-Oct 1935 - Chinese repel 1st Japanese attack on Changsha, Hunan province, central food source for south China armies
Nov 1935 - Japanese seize the coast of Guangxi province (north of Hainan, east of Indochina)
Nov 1935 - Mar 1936 - With Japanese overstretched, Chinese nationwide winter offensive shows the Chinese are still in the fight, but they fail to liberate any major strategic cities or regions.
Sep-Oct 1937 Chinese repel second Japanese attack on Changsha
— so far, this has exactly mirrored the timeline of the Sino-Japanese war for the period it was a strictly bilateral affair, from OTL July 1937 to December 1941, and applying it to the July 1933 to December 1937 timeframe instead.
From August 1941 on, Japan’s war was affected by a total US embargo- that’s not guaranteed to happen in August 1937 here. From December 1941, the Sino-Japanese war was entangled with the wider World War II, especially the Pacific Theater and CBI front.
Although it was a relatively isolated theater, the fronts affected each other, so if it was risky to mechanically apply OTL’s timeline to events in the war so far, it gets even riskier going forward.
But I’m going to do it, just to give us points of reference:
December 1937 - January 1938 Chinese repel third Japanese attack on Changsha
April-Dec 1940 - Japanese Ichigo offensive. They finally win at Changsha, and keep going, and build a land corridor connecting all occupied territories they hold within China up to the Indochinese border by the end of the year.
Jan-Apr 1941 - Japan remains on the offensive against the Chinese in south-central, southwest China, contemplating a potential assault on Chongqing and the Sichuan basin later in the year.
[And at this point, on OTL’s schedule of the war, in April 1945, Japan was getting hammered so hard from so many directions and aid was starting to flow in again so Japan lost the initiative in China, and China started counterattacking and regaining some provincial territories. In August, multiple deus ex machina, the two atomic bombs, and the Soviet invasion, rescued China from the Japanese occupation. Those aren’t going to happen in 1941. At least not without a a lot of fresh background and explaining.]
As I said earlier, the four year advance of the war provides an opportunity to test several hypotheses about the Sino-Japanese war and key trends in both countries during the 1930s, Japan’s wider policies, and other powers’ reactions to the Sino-Japanese war. Here are some examples of these hypotheses we get to test:
H1. Von Falkenhausen’s German aid and advice program the Chinese Nationalists in the early Nazi years was essential in making making the ChiNat’s National Revolutionary Army (NRA) as strong and resilient as it was by 1937 and the battle for Shanghai. This alternate scenario tests that by throwing the NRA into combat with the Japanese with four years less German training, armament, and advice. If it was a decisive factor, we should expect worse ChiNat/NRA performance.
H2. Jiang Jieshi believed China needed more time to unify and develop before it would be ready to fight Japan. He saw near-term war with Japan as a disaster, but time being on China’s side. If he was correct, in an earlier war, we could expect the Chinese Nationalist side to suffer from less administrative development and control, and less economic growth and infrastructure development from the ‘Nanjing decade’ of Chinese Nationalist control and revenue raising and investment, including less control and preparation of the Chinese interior to serve as a fall-back position after the loss of cities like Shanghai, Nanjing, and Wuhan
H3. On the other hand, Jiang’s political critics roundly condemned his policy of military non-resistance to Japan from 1931-1937 as morally wrong. Nonresistance against Japan, while trying to exterminate the Communists and crush regional dissidents was considered by most of the educated public and many political and armed factions to be immoral and unpatriotic. Jiang did in truth avoid major new damage from confrontation with Japan in 1933-1937, but he did have the cost of civil wars, and even regional uprisings whose stated motives were anti-Japanese. Politically, one could all argue this weakened Chinese national unity and morale, which could have set a bad example and led to weakened performance when resistance when full-scale war happened in OTL 1937.
H4. There’s a theory that the Sino-Japanese war between 1937 and 1941 in OTL was bankrupting Japan’s economy and depleting Japan’s foreign exchange reserves, even before taking any US or international embargos or asset freezes into account. This theory contends by that point Japan’s eroding economy was forcing it to either a) imminently withdraw from China or drastically scale down operations, or b) seize the western colonies in Southeast Asia and the western Pacific, and the resources in them, so they could be looted instead of purchased, to continue to power the Japanese economy and war effort in China. Unless something else in this alternate timeline cause China to lose or concede earlier, then, if this hypothesis were correct, Japan would have to make the choice to “go big or go home” in the Pacific by late 1937/early 1938. An interesting implication of that is while US and western mlitaries and navies aren’t very strong, the Japanese Navy isn’t very strong either. Even more importantly, None of France, Britain, Netherlands, nor the Soviet Union are directly tied down at that moment by occupation or invasion threats from Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy.
H5. Some scholars contend the total US embargo and asset freeze on Japan of August 1941, the precipitating step that in OTL confronted Japan with the choice of backing down or moving forward to strike the western powers throughout the Pacific, were not started, and would never have been started over China. Rather, these economic warfare initiatives were provoked by signs that Japan was threatening not just China, but areas beyond, by occupying French Indochina, and signing the Tripartite (Axis) Pact with Germany.
Changes on the Japanese side of the 1930s are less discussed, or perhaps I’ve just read less about them. So here’s an obscure, final hypothesis I propose:
H8. Japan didn’t go from parliamentary democracy to genocidal death cult overnight, despite the gradual rise of rogue military ops, government by assassination, and ultranationalist pressure groups. Japan at the public and institutional level probably wasn’t as fully settled in an acclimated to crazytown by 1933 as 1937. Nor were its Army forces as large. There’s a decent chance that if war escalates to full-scale in 1933 instead of 1937, and it’s not a ‘quick win’, public, parliamentary, and Imperial opposition and dissent may emerge and force the government to look for negotiations rather than victory after a year or two.
Scenario:
Instead of the Tanggu truce taking hold in May 1933 and leading to a lull in Japanese expansion for a few years and a de-escalation of Sino-Japanese fighting, confrontation and expansion escalate that summer and fall of 1933 to full-scale Sino-Japanese warfare.
The four year advance of the war provides an opportunity to test several hypotheses about the Sino-Japanese war and key trends in both countries during the 1930s, Japan’s wider policies, and other powers’ reactions to the Sino-Japanese war.
I will elaborate more on those later, but first I want to anchor us on the basic timeline of the second Sino-Japanese war from 1937 on, and apply it onto the somewhat different context of the earlier 1930s.
Now would all the outcomes of the battles and the schedules and intervals between them be the same? Now probably not. Odds would be some things would go differently.
But it is *not* enough to just say things would be different, throw your hands up, and stop there. This what-if invites the question of “how” things would go differently, to who’s relative advantage, Japanese, Chinese Nationalist or Chinese Communist. And, the timeline and military events of OTL’s Sino-Japanese war were shaped by broad Sino-Japanese national capabilities and geographic realities. So in my opinion, transposing the timeline of the 1937-1945 war onto the earlier starting time is still a decent place to start since it provides guideposts on deciding at what points in the struggle things would take a different direction from OTL in ways great or small.
So here’s the provisional timeline:
July 1933 - Equivalent of the Marco Polo Bridge incident happens, the incident in North China that gives the Japanese Army the excuse and motivation to do big operations in North China south of the Great Wall to grab a couple more provinces, but which forces the Chinese to resist on a national scale
Early August 1933 - Japanese complete conquest of Beijing and Tianjin, Nationalists, Communists and Warlords proclaim unified resistance under Jiang Jieshi
August 1933 - Japanese troops occupy Chahar province, eastern Inner Mongolia
August 13-Nov 20th 1933 - Japanese ultimately win the hard fought battle of Shanghai against Jiang’s central government troops
August-Nov 1933 - Japanese seize North China provinces advancing south along the Beijing-Wuhan and Tianjin-Pukou railway axes
Dec 1933 - Japanese seize the capital of Nanjing and commit massacre of civilians, Nationalist central government evacuates to Wuhan
June-October 1934 - Japanese conquest of Wuhan, Nationalist central government evacuates to Chongqing
October-December 1934 - Japanese conquest of Guangzhou
Feb 1935 - Japanese conquest of Hainan island
Sep-Oct 1935 - Chinese repel 1st Japanese attack on Changsha, Hunan province, central food source for south China armies
Nov 1935 - Japanese seize the coast of Guangxi province (north of Hainan, east of Indochina)
Nov 1935 - Mar 1936 - With Japanese overstretched, Chinese nationwide winter offensive shows the Chinese are still in the fight, but they fail to liberate any major strategic cities or regions.
Sep-Oct 1937 Chinese repel second Japanese attack on Changsha
— so far, this has exactly mirrored the timeline of the Sino-Japanese war for the period it was a strictly bilateral affair, from OTL July 1937 to December 1941, and applying it to the July 1933 to December 1937 timeframe instead.
From August 1941 on, Japan’s war was affected by a total US embargo- that’s not guaranteed to happen in August 1937 here. From December 1941, the Sino-Japanese war was entangled with the wider World War II, especially the Pacific Theater and CBI front.
Although it was a relatively isolated theater, the fronts affected each other, so if it was risky to mechanically apply OTL’s timeline to events in the war so far, it gets even riskier going forward.
But I’m going to do it, just to give us points of reference:
December 1937 - January 1938 Chinese repel third Japanese attack on Changsha
April-Dec 1940 - Japanese Ichigo offensive. They finally win at Changsha, and keep going, and build a land corridor connecting all occupied territories they hold within China up to the Indochinese border by the end of the year.
Jan-Apr 1941 - Japan remains on the offensive against the Chinese in south-central, southwest China, contemplating a potential assault on Chongqing and the Sichuan basin later in the year.
[And at this point, on OTL’s schedule of the war, in April 1945, Japan was getting hammered so hard from so many directions and aid was starting to flow in again so Japan lost the initiative in China, and China started counterattacking and regaining some provincial territories. In August, multiple deus ex machina, the two atomic bombs, and the Soviet invasion, rescued China from the Japanese occupation. Those aren’t going to happen in 1941. At least not without a a lot of fresh background and explaining.]
As I said earlier, the four year advance of the war provides an opportunity to test several hypotheses about the Sino-Japanese war and key trends in both countries during the 1930s, Japan’s wider policies, and other powers’ reactions to the Sino-Japanese war. Here are some examples of these hypotheses we get to test:
H1. Von Falkenhausen’s German aid and advice program the Chinese Nationalists in the early Nazi years was essential in making making the ChiNat’s National Revolutionary Army (NRA) as strong and resilient as it was by 1937 and the battle for Shanghai. This alternate scenario tests that by throwing the NRA into combat with the Japanese with four years less German training, armament, and advice. If it was a decisive factor, we should expect worse ChiNat/NRA performance.
H2. Jiang Jieshi believed China needed more time to unify and develop before it would be ready to fight Japan. He saw near-term war with Japan as a disaster, but time being on China’s side. If he was correct, in an earlier war, we could expect the Chinese Nationalist side to suffer from less administrative development and control, and less economic growth and infrastructure development from the ‘Nanjing decade’ of Chinese Nationalist control and revenue raising and investment, including less control and preparation of the Chinese interior to serve as a fall-back position after the loss of cities like Shanghai, Nanjing, and Wuhan
H3. On the other hand, Jiang’s political critics roundly condemned his policy of military non-resistance to Japan from 1931-1937 as morally wrong. Nonresistance against Japan, while trying to exterminate the Communists and crush regional dissidents was considered by most of the educated public and many political and armed factions to be immoral and unpatriotic. Jiang did in truth avoid major new damage from confrontation with Japan in 1933-1937, but he did have the cost of civil wars, and even regional uprisings whose stated motives were anti-Japanese. Politically, one could all argue this weakened Chinese national unity and morale, which could have set a bad example and led to weakened performance when resistance when full-scale war happened in OTL 1937.
H4. There’s a theory that the Sino-Japanese war between 1937 and 1941 in OTL was bankrupting Japan’s economy and depleting Japan’s foreign exchange reserves, even before taking any US or international embargos or asset freezes into account. This theory contends by that point Japan’s eroding economy was forcing it to either a) imminently withdraw from China or drastically scale down operations, or b) seize the western colonies in Southeast Asia and the western Pacific, and the resources in them, so they could be looted instead of purchased, to continue to power the Japanese economy and war effort in China. Unless something else in this alternate timeline cause China to lose or concede earlier, then, if this hypothesis were correct, Japan would have to make the choice to “go big or go home” in the Pacific by late 1937/early 1938. An interesting implication of that is while US and western mlitaries and navies aren’t very strong, the Japanese Navy isn’t very strong either. Even more importantly, None of France, Britain, Netherlands, nor the Soviet Union are directly tied down at that moment by occupation or invasion threats from Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy.
H5. Some scholars contend the total US embargo and asset freeze on Japan of August 1941, the precipitating step that in OTL confronted Japan with the choice of backing down or moving forward to strike the western powers throughout the Pacific, were not started, and would never have been started over China. Rather, these economic warfare initiatives were provoked by signs that Japan was threatening not just China, but areas beyond, by occupying French Indochina, and signing the Tripartite (Axis) Pact with Germany.
- If they are correct, in this alternate timeline, in by August 1938 the situation will not be ripe for the Japanese to have occupied or attacked French Indochina, and escalated military cooperation with Germany beyond the vague terms of the Anti-Comintern pact looks unattractive, so a U.S. and multinational embargo is highly unlikely. That can change Japanese calculations and allow them to keep fighting the Chinese alone for several more years without the pressure of having to attack other areas outside of China.
- If they are correct, a US embargo and asset freeze would have been coming anyway around August 1933, even if Japan was only fighting in China and not allying more with Germany and there was no war in Europe yet. A US embargo and asset freeze as the biggest oil exporter to Japan and biggest foreign holder Japanese reserves, would be a big problem for Japan, and the British would be highly susceptible to pressure to follow suit. Any oil embargo would be more third-party oil producers still in the game, but Japan’s ability to pay in hard currency is crunched. This could all lead to Japan having to stand down by 1939, or having to scream and leap to seize all Southeast Asia against odds they know are impossible against the full might of every other significant Navy in the world.
- Dealing with Japanese assaults on Shanghai, Nanjing, Wuhan, Nanjing, and Guangzhou in 1933-1934, the Chinese Nationalists will never be able to finish their 5th Encirclement campaign and other encirclement campaigns of that year that forced the evacuation of all the Chinese Communist base areas in southern and central China. All these Chinese Communist base areas will remain in place. Communist troops will likely be called in to participate in the defense of Wuhan and Changsha as part of the United Front.
- The Chinese Communists will go into the Sino-Japanese War healthier in numbers and equipment than in OTL, with their center of gravity further to the south in the country, but potentially without having some of the Long March experiences and “lessons” that some say were part of the secret sauce of their ultimate victory.
Changes on the Japanese side of the 1930s are less discussed, or perhaps I’ve just read less about them. So here’s an obscure, final hypothesis I propose:
H8. Japan didn’t go from parliamentary democracy to genocidal death cult overnight, despite the gradual rise of rogue military ops, government by assassination, and ultranationalist pressure groups. Japan at the public and institutional level probably wasn’t as fully settled in an acclimated to crazytown by 1933 as 1937. Nor were its Army forces as large. There’s a decent chance that if war escalates to full-scale in 1933 instead of 1937, and it’s not a ‘quick win’, public, parliamentary, and Imperial opposition and dissent may emerge and force the government to look for negotiations rather than victory after a year or two.