– Interviews with Refugees from China – Aug. 27, 1937 –
Eighty-eight years ago today most people in the U.S. were listening to reports of the invasion of China by Japan and hearing first-hand accounts of the fighting by rescued American nationals, caught in the middle of the turmoil.
The full-scale war began on 7 July 1937 with the Marco Polo Bridge incident near Beijing, which prompted a full-scale Japanese invasion of the rest of China. The Japanese captured the capital of Nanjing in 1937 and perpetrated the Nanjing Massacre. After failing to stop the Japanese capture of Wuhan in 1938, then China’s de facto capital at the time, the Nationalist government relocated to Chongqing in the Chinese interior. After the Sino-Soviet Non-Aggression Pact, Soviet aid bolstered the National Revolutionary Army and Air Force. By 1939, after Chinese victories at Changsha and with Japan’s lines of communications stretched deep into the interior, the war reached a stalemate. The Japanese were unable to defeat CCP forces in Shaanxi, who waged a campaign of sabotage and guerrilla warfare. In November 1939, Nationalist forces launched a large scale winter offensive, and in August 1940, CCP forces launched the Hundred Regiments Offensive in central China. In April 1941, Soviet aid was halted with the Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact.
In China, the war is most commonly known as the “War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression” (simplified Chinese: 抗日战争; traditional Chinese: 抗日戰爭), and shortened to “Resistance against Japanese Aggression” (抗日) or the “War of Resistance” (抗战; 抗戰). It was also called the “Eight Years’ War of Resistance” (八年抗战; 八年抗戰), but in 2017 the Chinese Ministry of Education issued a directive stating that textbooks were to refer to the war as the “Fourteen Years’ War of Resistance” (十四年抗战; 十四年抗戰), reflecting a focus on the broader conflict with Japan going back to the 1931 Japanese invasion of Manchuria.[35] According to historian Rana Mitter, historians in China are unhappy with the blanket revision, and (despite sustained tensions) the Republic of China did not consider itself to be in an ongoing war with Japan over these six years.[36][need quotation to verify] It is also referred to as part of the “Global Anti-Fascist War”.
Here is a program of interviews with rescued tourists and workers, having landed in Honolulu on August 27, 1937.
Little did we realize at the time it would be the harbinger of things to come a few short years later.
