Invasion Of Manchuria Quotes

The Japanese conquest of Manchuria and their full-scale invasion of China in 1937 led to clashes on the badly mapped Soviet-Manchurian frontier. Some of these were serious and involved large-scale tank battles, which the Russians, under Marshal Zhukov, won.

They did that so they could blame the explosion on the Chinese and create a pretext for invading Manchuria.

By 1932, the Kwantung Army controlled all of Manchuria, setting up a puppet state called Manchukuo.

The Second Sino-Japanese War Fortified by their conquest of Manchuria in 1931, Japan aggressively

January of 1895, the Chinese went into Manchuria, where there was a sheltered harbor at Weihaiwei

similar to those found in Manchuria and Mongolia.

the end of 1939, Japan’s oil stocks had stood at fifty-five million barrels, enough to fight for eighteen months. Sixty percent of oil imports came from the United States. Japan’s islands produced only twelve percent of the iron ore needed; the rest came from Manchuria with its hostile Russian neighbor. But the Japanese military remained split between those favoring a strike north against the hated Communist Soviet Union or south to grab the resources of Southeast Asia. The United States fleet remained an obstacle to both strategies. The navy stuck to its war plan of an ambush of the U.S. fleet in home waters. That way Japanese gunships could carry more guns and less fuel. But carrier admirals such as Yamamoto would need more oil to fuel far-striking carriers and their planes. The hawks itched for action in either direction. Admiral Chuichi Nagumo disclosed his strategy to a dovish colleague, Admiral Shigeyoshi Inouye, who believed Japan should adhere to its Naval Treaty obligations. “You’re a fool,” chided Nagumo. “I thrust with a dagger up under the ribs, and that would be it. . . .” Germany’s surprise invasion of the Soviet Union June 22, 1941, put blood in the water. Yosuke Matsuoka, now foreign minister, counseled: “When Germany wipes out the Soviet Union, we can’t simply share in the spoils of victory unless we have done something. We must either shed our blood or embark on diplomacy. It’s better to shed blood.

The Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931 triggered a renewal of forces in Hawaiʻi. This happened again when the Empire of Japan waged an undeclared war against China in 1937. Signs of impending war with Japan were looming, and all sorts of pressures were building up to an eventual outbreak of conflict. Such pressures would be materially reflected in the lives of Hawaiians as well, including annual blackout drills and exercises for Hawaiian civilians in Honolulu. Civil defense units and outposts began to spring up in rural areas and surrounding military installations. Further, emergency disaster preparations began in 1940, with Honolulu women being tasked with surgical dressing and wound bandage production. There were also first-aid training sessions held by the local Red Cross. Honolulu saw the establishment of a blood bank, and the city’s Schofield Barracks would grow to become one of the largest US Army installations in the world, hosting and fielding over forty thousand troops by 1941. The primary objective of such a large force was to hold and defend Pearl Harbor and, by extension, Hawaiʻi from Japanese raiders and invaders. Incidents like the bombing of the SS President Hoover, the flagship Augusta, and the sinking of the USS Panay were strong indicators that Hawaiʻi was going to be sandwiched between two political and military bulldozers.

Once Stalin had more than a million soldiers occupying Manchuria, the Chinese civil war became inevitable, because Mao understood that the central government no longer had the capability to eliminate him militarily. The irony, of course, is that the president of the United States, meeting with Stalin at Yalta, implored the Soviets to send their troops to Manchuria and that the Soviet invasion was facilitated by American Lend-Lease supplies.

The same commitment to antimilitarism can be found, however, throughout anarchist and syndicalist history, including opposition to the Anglo-Boer War (1899-1902), the annexation of Korea (1910), the invasion of Manchuria (1931), the Second World War (1939-1945), the Algerian War (1954-1962), the Vietnam War (1959-1975), the Gulf War (1990), the Russian war against Chechnya (starting in 1991), the invasion of Afghanistan (beginning in 2001), the occupation of Iraq (starting in 2003), and innumerable other conflicts.