Between 1931 and 1937 the Japanese army had invaded Manchuria and, created a demilitarized zone in East Hubei
and a Mongolian puppet state around Charhar and fought the Chinese in Shanghai.
Fumimaro Konoe became Prime Minister in mid-1937, but the army, which had conducted the war largely independently,
had taken over many positions within the government.
In China, Chiang Kai Shek, realizing he would have little support from the League of Nations,
strengthened his relationship with Nazi Germany to improve his armies.
And, with war looming, he had united many of the warlords and communists into a united front.
But some, like the the Guangxi Clique and Shannxi ran virtually indenpendent states.
And Xinjiang was in a state of war and under Soviet influence.
Plus after years of war, China's army was left weak.
But in early July 1937 Japanese soldiers, who had conducted military exercises outside Beijing for decades, exchanged fire with Chinese soldiers.
The Japanese army responded to this, the Marco Polo Bridge incident, with a full scale invasion without support from Konoe.
Within a month they quickly captured Beijing and Tianjin, crushed a mutiny in Hubei and continued South to Taiyuan.
Chiang responded by attacking the Japanese in Shanghai, but over 200,000 Japanese reinforcements arrived in Shanghai and, by November captured the City.
The Japanese then captured Nanking, the capital of China, in December and, over the next month,
carried out the Rape of Nanking, killing and raping hundreds of thousands.
They split their conquests into puppet regimes and continued onto the new Chinese capital, Wuhan.
To delay their advance, the Chinese flooded the Yellow River. This however killed many Chinese and devastated the region.
This controversial tactic encouraged many to join the Communists and didn't even stop the Japanese taking Wuhan in October 1938.
The warlord of Sichuan, Liu Xiang, had died earlier in the year, so the KMT moved their capital to Chongqing, ending the autonomy of the region.
The Japanese bombed the Chongqing, but decided to capture port cities like Fuzhou, Canton and Hainan in late 1938 and early 1939 hoping to blockade the Chinese.
While in the North the new puppet state of Mengjiang was expanded.
However, the Japanese then suffered a string of defeats. First in April, their advance inland on Suizhou failed and the Communists fought a successful guerilla campaign against the Japanese.
Plus, under the new Prime Minister, Hiranuma Kiichiro, Japan was forced to sign a non-aggression pact with the Soviets in August after they lost a border skirmish at Khalkyn Gol in Mongolia.
In the North the Muslim Generals of the Ma Clique prevented Japan’s Mongolian allies from pushing West and stopped Japanese agents from contacting Tibet and forming an alliance.
Konoe returned to power as Japan made their first failed attempt to take Changsha in September 1939 and there invasion of Guangxi also failed.
In early 1940 the Chinese unsuccessfully countered, but it caught the Japanese off guard and a stalemate ensued.
However many atrocities continued to take place, for instance in Manchuria Unit 731 conducted medical experiments on prisoners.
But Konoe, and the Tosheiha faction, still hoped to unite Asia and created the Greater East Asia co-prosperity Sphere and new puppet state in China lead by Chiang’s old rival, Wang Jingwei.
And they signed the Tripartite act with Italy and Germany bringing Japan into the war against the allies.
In September 1940 they moved into Indochina and in 1941, now under Tojo, they invaded Hong Kong, Malaysia and attacked Pearl Harbour, starting the Pacific war.
Japan's alliance with Germany stopped Nazi's sending supplies to Chiang and the Soviets stopped sending aid to China
because Shen Shicai, the warlord of Xinjiang, broke his alliance with them when he thought the Nazis would win.
So the Allies had to fly aid over Japanese controlled Burma, but this helped tie down tie down over a million Japanese troops
in the region and repel further Japanese assaults on Changsha and Sichuan in 1943
Meanwhile, despite around 3,000,000 soldiers being killed during the war and millions more civilians,
the Chinese army continued to grow in size and they even sent troops to help fight in Indochina and Burma.
But in 1944, with America closing in in the Pacific, the overstretched Japanese made a final assault South.
Operation Ichi-Go was a success and helped create a land route to Indochina but their subsequent campaigns proved to be inconsequential.
In August 1945 the Americans dropped Atomic bombs on Japan while the Soviet Union invaded Manchuria, forcing Japan to surrender.
China got Taiwan from Japan temporarily occupied Northern Indochina, but Chiang refused the offer to take over Indochina, allowing the French to move in again.
This is because the Soviet Union helped strengthen the communists in China by giving them Manchuria.
So many warlords like Li Zongren in the South, Yan Xishan in Shaanxi and Ma Bufang in Qinghai all remained loyal to Chiang to defeat the communists.
However Chiang did remove Long Yun from power in Yunnan.
And the KMT even recruited some Japanese and kept them stationed in Chinese Cities to stop the Communists from taking over.
But the Nationalists corruption and misconduct during the war encouraged many people to join the Communists and, the KMT was unable to stop them from taking over a few years later.