Late on 7 July 1937 Japanese troops on night maneuvers near the Marco Polo Bridge, outside Peiping (now Beijing), clashed with Chinese troops of the 29th Army. Each side blamed the other, and the incident grew into a full-scale war between China and Japan. On 7 July 1944 the Japanese made a mass attack on Saipan.
Marco Polo Bridge incident
7 July 1937 · 89 years ago
North China in 1937
Japan kept troops in North China under the Protocol of 1901 between China and the powers and the agreements that followed it. On the night of 7 July a detachment of Japanese troops from Fengtai, near Peiping, now Beijing, was holding night maneuvers near the Marco Polo Bridge, or Lukouchiao. Chinese troops of the 29th Army were stationed at the bridge and in the nearby walled town of Wanping.1
Even the right to hold maneuvers there was disputed. The Japanese Embassy in Washington said the right was set out in a Sino-Japanese protocol of 1902 and that the Chinese had been told of the maneuver in advance; the Chinese Embassy wrote that the maneuvers were not permissible even under the Protocol of 1901; the US Embassy in Peiping judged the Japanese claim ill-founded.2
A shot in the dark
Shortly before midnight shots were fired near the bridge. Who fired them was disputed from the start: "The Chinese and Japanese versions of the incident differ," the League of Nations committee wrote in October.3
In the Japanese version, Chinese troops of the 29th Army opened fire on the Japanese soldiers; the Japanese Embassy in Washington added that they did so "for no cause at all".4
In the Chinese version, the Japanese reported a soldier missing and demanded entry to Wanping to search the town; when they were refused, they attacked it. Chinese officials added that the missing soldier had in fact come back. The Chinese Embassy in Washington wrote that Japanese troops "suddenly opened an attack on the city of Wanping".5
The fighting flared again on the morning of 8 July, while negotiators were in Wanping, and again each side blamed the other.6
Planned or not?
Each side accused the other of planning it. On 11 July the Japanese government blamed unlawful firing by the 29th Army in the middle of the night of 7 July, and the cabinet called the incident, beyond any room for doubt, a premeditated armed anti-Japanese action by the Chinese side (our translation). A Chinese Foreign Office official told the US Embassy on 9 July that the incident was "clearly premeditated by the Japanese", and Chiang Kai-shek said in his Kuling address that "it can easily be seen that the Lukouchiao incident is not a sudden and accidental development".7
Neither the League committee nor the US Embassy in Peiping tried to settle who fired first. The League set the two versions side by side, and the embassy, reporting in August, wrote: "Presumably it will never be established whether a Japanese or a Chinese fired the shot which precipitated the fighting in the vicinity of Marco Polo Bridge".8
From incident to war
On 11 July a local settlement was signed. The same day the Japanese cabinet decided to reinforce its army in North China with units from the Kwantung Army in Manchuria and from Korea and to send more from Japan, while still declaring a policy of not enlarging the incident (our translation).9
The settlement did not hold. Fighting spread to the outskirts of Peiping, and by the end of July the 29th Army had withdrawn from the Peiping and Tientsin area and the Japanese held both cities. The clash grew into a full-scale war between China and Japan.10
For decades China dated its war of resistance from 7 July 1937. In January 2017 its Ministry of Education ordered textbooks to date it from 18 September 1931, the Mukden incident, making it a fourteen-year war. The attack on Pearl Harbor, which brought the United States into the war against Japan, is told in our article on the attack.11
Also on this day
Battle of Peritheorion
7 July 1345 · 681 years ago
Before the walls of Peritheorion in Thrace, the Bulgarian brigand ruler Momchil faced a Byzantine and Turkish army allied to John VI Kantakouzenos, amid the Byzantine civil war. Pinned against the town walls, Momchil's men were crushed and he himself was killed.
1944: early in the morning on Saipan the Japanese launched a mass banzai attack down the Tanapag plain against the 1st and 2d Battalions of the US 105th Infantry. Lieutenant Colonel William J. O'Brien, commanding the 1st Battalion, was killed and posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor. A count made for the 27th Division found 4,311 Japanese dead in the area of the attack; Crowl notes that some of them had been killed earlier by naval gunfire or artillery. The landing on Saipan is told on our 15 June page.12
