On This Day in History: July 7

The Marco Polo Bridge Incident

Subscribers can listen to the audio of this post here.

Marco! Polo! Marco! Was that a gunshot? Fuck! Shoot back! In tales of World War II, the western world doesn’t think too much about China, despite its having a similar death toll to that of the Soviet Union, which was roughly 40 times the number of American deaths.

--On This Day in History, Shit Went Down: July 7, 1937--

In 1931 Japan invaded and occupied Manchuria, the northeast corner of China, and created a puppet state. Needless to say, the Chinese were displeased. An unsteady truce lasted the next six years, as Japan moved more and more soldiers into the occupied territory. Then, on July 7, 1937, a critical confrontation happened at what the western world would come to call the “Marco Polo Bridge Incident.” (The local name is Lugou Bridge.)

Many consider the start of WWII to be Germany’s 1939 invasion of Poland, but the Chinese are inclined to disagree. As the story goes, on the evening of July 7 a Japanese soldier went missing while on maneuvers. His comrades demanded entry into a small town near the bridge to search for him. The local Chinese garrison told them to fuck off. A shot was heard, then both sides began blasting away like 30 to 50 feral hogs invaded a hillbilly barbecue.

Then everything rapidly went to excrement. Efforts made to defuse tensions were fruitless, and both sides rapidly began massing troops to square off against each other; the battle escalated. The Japanese used the incident as an excuse for a full-scale invasion of China. Referred to as the Second Sino-Japanese War, it merged with the overall Big Second Let’s Kill a Bunch of Humanity Extravaganza when Japan attacked Pearl Harbor in 1941.

The Japanese captured Beijing, Shanghai, and Nanjing, which was then the capital. And there was this thing that happened called “The Rape of Nanjing,” which was just as horrible as it sounds. The Japanese used poison gas on Chinese soldiers and civilians more than 2,000 times during the war. They also dropped bubonic-plague-infested fleas on Chinese cities, causing massive outbreaks of the disease. The invaders also used the Chinese as medical guinea pigs, performing horrible experiments. China would suffer until the Japanese surrender to American forces on August 15, 1945. With the millions of Chinese dead during the eight years of war, most of them civilians, it is accurately referred to as “the Asian holocaust.”

Since the war, Japan has been parsimonious in the offering of apologies for these atrocities, and relations between the two countries remain strained.

Subscribe for access to cool shit:

Get the book ON THIS DAY IN HISTORY SH!T WENT DOWN.