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The Japanese found they could control the points and lines, that is, the cities and railroads, but little in between. The Japanese would carry out an effective counterinsurgency operation in one area and drive the guerrillas out, only to have new insurgencies break out and the guerrillas reappear elsewhere. In the end, the Japanese, in spite of its superior army, could not control China. Over five hundred thousand Japanese soldiers died in China. With all due respect to the fighting ability of the American, British, Australian, and Indian soldiers and sailors, China's resistance played a major role in Japan's defeat in 1945.
Japan Became Isolated
Japan's invasion of China in 1937 isolated it diplomatically from the United States and Great Britain. Although trade continued, the two primary Western governments were enraged by Japan's actions. The Japanese particularly angered the British, the dominant economic and industrial power in Shanghai, by their attack on that city. But neither the United States nor Great Britain came to China's support. Anglo-America, in the depths of an economic depression, did not have money or military power to lend China, and President Roosevelt in the United States faced a powerful isolationist movement that opposed any U.S. involvement, even indirect, in the war. In fact, the best Chinese divisions in resisting the Japanese in 1937 were trained by German officers. While Chiang Kai-shek hoped for Anglo-American support, it never came. The Sino-Japanese War was a stalemate from 1938 until the Pacific War broke out in December 1941, with Chiang primarily fighting the Chinese Communists, whom he feared more than the Japanese.
In Tokyo, the Japanese army's leaders, frustrated over the impasse as they had expected an easy victory, debated how to end the war in China. General Ishiwara Kanji, who had opposed the invasion of China in the summer of 1937, reiterated his realistic argument of the previous year, that China was too large to conquer, had little to offer Japan in the way of raw materials (excluding northeast China, which the Japanese army, under Ishiwara's leadership, had already seized in 1931-1932), and that his own army, by invading and brutalizing China, had galvanized Chinese nationalism, making it even more difficult to subdue. Most of the other army brass, however, rejected Ishiwara's analysis and, although he was once considered the brightest man in the army, he was transferred to a minor post, then retired in 1941, prior to the attack on Pearl Harbor. His fellow officers continued to believe in the invincibility of the Imperial Army, the myth that they had invaded China in a "holy war" to liberate it from Western imperialism, and that the reason for China's successful resistance was British and American support for Chiang Kai-shek, support which was in fact non-existent.
In the late 1930s, the military gradually took control of the Japanese government, spent money with no idea of where it was coming from, and began to look around for new areas to incorporate into its imperialist domain. By 1938 through 1940, the area the military eyed most consistently was Southeast Asia. Why? First, the army conducted the China war, and the navy wanted a piece of the action. An invasion of American, French, British, and Dutch colonies to the south would give it an ample stage for operations. Second, Japan was seeking an end to the war in China, and given the army's view that it was British and American support that kept Chiang fighting, it saw Hong Kong, Vietnam, and Burma as obvious targets.
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