Peace In Their Time

Today's episode is a double-conclusion as both the Long March and this miniseries come to a close. The northern course of the March was more notable for adverse climates and geography, which was probably worse than what the Nationalists could throw at them.    Bibliography for this episode:    Short, Philip Mao, A Life Henry Holdt and Company LLC 1999 Wilson, Dick The Long March 1935: The Epic of...

By autumn 1934 it was clear that the Communists could not stay in southeast China. The solution was to step out for a walk, a long one.    Bibliography for this episode:    Short, Philip Mao, A Life Henry Holdt and Company LLC 1999 Wilson, Dick The Long March 1935: The Epic of Chinese Communism's Survival The Viking Press 1971 Chung-gi, Kwei The Kuomintang-Communist Struggle in China 1922-1949 Mar...

Switching gears in China, today I switch to covering Mao and the CPC's misadventures in southern China. The stretch of time between the end of the 20s and the start of the Long March were filled with false starts and missed opportunities as competing interests among the Communists squandered the victories over Chiang Kai-shek's encirclement campaigns.    Bibliography for this episode:    Short, Ph...

OK, so there's a lot more to this episode than the Xi'an Incident, but it's the most dramatic. Other than that, we've got secret societies, half-baked ideologies, and the false impression that things could get better in KMT China.    Bibliography for this episode:    Fairbank, John K & Denis Twitchett The Cambridge History of China, Volume 12: Republican China 1912-1949, Part 1 Cambridge Unive...

With the Japanese outright occupying Chinese territory, Chiang Kai-shek had to move fast. A war was guaranteed, but preparations still needed to be made and domestic enemies still needed to be taken care of.    Bibliography for this episode:    Fairbank, John K & Denis Twitchett The Cambridge History of China, Volume 12: Republican China 1912-1949, Part 1 Cambridge University Press 1983 Fairba...

Today the focus shifts back to the misadventures of Chiang Kai-shek and the Nanjing government. The Central Plains War had been won, and it looked for the briefest of moments that things were going to be fine for them. Then the new campaigns against the Communists fell into disarray, and in September 1931 the Japanese invaded Manchuria. For Chiang, there would be no breaks. Ever.    Bibliography f...

A fun and not very well-known little border war was the Sino-Soviet conflict of 1929. Basically the Soviets controlled the railways of northern Manchuria, and the Chinese wanted them out. Simple idea, difficult to execute in practice, and the way it was handled opened the door for the Red Army to humiliate the warlord forces of Manchuria. Which would in turn get other parties thinking about how ea...

We get the real-deal history underway with some very familiar material: a warlord showdown. Except this would be bigger than ever, and would decide if Chiang Kai-shek's centralizing policies even had a prayer.    Bibliography for this episode:    Fairbank, John K & Denis Twitchett The Cambridge History of China, Volume 12: Republican China 1912-1949, Part 1 Cambridge University Press 1983 Fair...

Last season I left off my China coverage with the successful conclusion of the Northern Expedition. But just because that long campaign was successful didn't mean that Chiang Kai-shek and the KMT had everything go their way. To kick off this new mini-series I'll be spending some time re-introducing some older friends, as well as newer groups and factions that were going to play a larger role in th...

When events in China cooled off, the ones back in Japan heated up. With the exit of Japan from the League of Nations in 1933, the unilateralist approach was chosen to secure the empire. But even then, there was disagreement on approach that would create conflict on the home islands that were only starting to get resolved by the time formal war with China broke out in 1937.    Bibliography for this...

Today we wrap up our close-in look at the puppet state of Manchukuo and cover what drove the state and kept it a function part of the Japanese Empire. The short answer is money, but there were also fitful attempts at building an identity mixed in there too. Not terribly successful ones, but enough that there was a veneer of legitimacy covering up the abject servitude.    Bibliography for this epis...

Turns out that when you build an artificial state via conquest and exploitation that it doesn't lend itself to stability. The establishment of Manchukuo in early 1932 didn't clear out the hundreds of thousands of unemployed soldiers, partisans, and bandits roaming the countryside. It would take years of campaigning to instill even a sense of control, and the Chinese collaborators would at best mak...

While the Kwantung Army ran roughshod over Manchuria in defiance of all orders coming out of Tokyo, events back in the Home Islands didn't remain static. The crisis caused a nationalistic frenzy among leaders, in the media, and in public opinion. A surge of domestic terrorism in the spring of 1932 would fatally undermine elected government, as Hirohito and his advisors turned towards hand-picked l...

The first big aggression of the chaotic 30s proved not to come from Europe, but East Asia. And the Japanese invasion of Manchuria wasn't even a deliberate act of state policy, but the consequence of renegade Japanese officers taking matters into their own hands. But once events got underway, the government in Tokyo proved incapable of stopping the expansion of conflict on the Asian mainland.    Bi...

Today marks the start of our second miniseries covering the Japanese Empire! That nation had spent the 20s grappling with an underperforming economy, a more active democracy, and how to ensure national security on its own terms. Turns out, none of those issues had been properly addressed, and the Great Depression would form a sad denouement to all the work done during the prior decade.    Bibliogr...

Power had been won, but for Adolf Hitler, that wasn't enough. War was the goal of the new regime, and it needed the people firmly behind it. Where Imperial Germany failed, the Nazis would succeed. German society would be configured so that it would support the regime even after all hope of victory was lost. That's the topic of today's episode, how the people were bound to the new state.    Evans,...

With internal opposition crushed, there remained just one problem for Hitler's new regime. The SA had been the vanguard of the Nazis, and had fought the National Socialist fight on the streets for years. But their independence, and the vocal threats of revolution coming from SA Chief of Staff Ernst Rohm, practically demanded a response. The enemies of the Brownshirts closed in through the first ha...

This week is a break from the main narrative, and I head back to the 20s to cover the development of the SA, as well as touch on the origins of their off-shoots and eventual rivals, the SS. The relationship between Hitler and the Brownshirts would be fraught from almost the get-go, and ironically it would be the their mutual success in the removal of all other threats to the Nazi Party that would...

Hitler coming to power in Germany was bad enough, but a marked turn in the nation's trajectory came after the Reichstag fire. That incident, so random but also so impactful that it would spawn theories that it was a false flag by the Nazis, was the moment where the seizure of power went into overdrive. Nothing would ever be the same after it.    Evans, Richard The Coming of the Third Reich Penguin...

After years of scheming, Schleicher had gained the Chancellorship, but it turned out that his government was DOA. All his enemies came together against him, paving the way for Hitler to gain the power he had been demanding for years.    Bibliography for this episode:    Evans, Richard The Coming of the Third Reich Penguin Books, 2003 Kershaw, Ian Hitler, 1889-1936: Hubris W.W. Norton & Company...

The conspiracies and backstabbing roll on in the back half of 1932, and patience started wearing thin. Nobody in the establishment could force a settlement, and Hitler refused to cut a deal. But despite dissent in the NSDAP, Hitler stood firm in his demand for a government on his terms.    Bibliography for this episode:    Evans, Richard The Coming of the Third Reich Penguin Books, 2003 Kershaw, I...

With the economy destroyed and the specter of privation and revolution haunting Germany, Hitler's political star was ascendant. Despite not being able to clench a majority of votes or convince (or want) anyone else to work with the Nazis, Hitler was an inescapable part of the nation's politics. Which meant that the conservative establishment bent on dissolving the country's democracy would be forc...

The aftershocks of the September 1930 election were felt immediately in Germany, and the Reichstag was left paralyzed. It was left to Chancellor Bruning to govern by decree, and in the depths of the Great Depression, that meant taking unprecedented steps to combat the crisis. The efforts wouldn't matter though, as Hitler was right there to exploit the continued economic collapse to bring himself e...

As the Depression got going in Germany, the Nazis were a fringe party with barely any national representation. Long story short, they weren't expected to be big players in Chancellor Bruning's constitutional crisis. But for years the Nazis had been carefully laying the groundwork for bigger ambitions, and after a few couple hiccups, were ready to make it big in the September 1930 elections.    Bib...

The Weimar Republic was not a state built to last, and the Depression was a deathblow to it. Not only was the suffering bad enough, but conservative politicians saw it as their window to do away with democracy entirely. This would lead to outcomes they failed to predict, and within just a few years Germany would be unrecognizable compared to what it was before the start of the crisis. Took me a wh...