Mukden incident

Based on Wikipedia: Mukden incident

On the night of September 18, 1931, a Japanese lieutenant named Suemori Kawamoto crouched near a railway track in Manchuria and lit a fuse. The explosion that followed was so pathetically weak that it barely scratched the rails. A train rumbled over the "damaged" section just ten minutes later, arriving at its destination perfectly on schedule.

This feeble bang would change the course of the twentieth century.

Within hours, Japanese artillery was shelling Chinese garrisons. Within months, Japan had conquered all of Manchuria—a territory larger than France and Germany combined. Within a decade, the world would be engulfed in a war that killed tens of millions. And it all began with a bomb that couldn't even break a railroad track.

The Art of the False Flag

The Mukden Incident, as it came to be known, stands as one of history's most consequential acts of deception. In military and intelligence terminology, this was a "false flag" operation—an attack designed to look like it came from someone else, specifically to justify retaliation against that someone else. The Japanese military staged an attack on their own railway, blamed it on Chinese forces, and used it as a pretext to launch a full-scale invasion they had been planning for months.

The scheme was not particularly sophisticated. In fact, it was almost comically transparent.

The plotters chose their location carefully: a stretch of track near a place called Liutiao Lake, about eight hundred meters from a Chinese military garrison. The site had no strategic importance whatsoever—no bridge, no junction, no military significance. But that was precisely the point. If they had actually destroyed an important bridge, they would have needed to rebuild it. Better to stage a fake attack on a worthless patch of track that could be "repaired" immediately.

The Japanese press, following the script, immediately began calling the site "Liutiao Ditch" and "Liutiao Bridge," making it sound far more significant than the flat, featureless stretch of land it actually was.

Seeds Planted Decades Earlier

To understand why Japanese officers were planting bombs in Manchuria in 1931, you need to go back to 1905 and a war most people have forgotten.

The Russo-Japanese War was a stunning upset. Japan, an Asian nation that had only recently emerged from centuries of isolation, defeated the Russian Empire—one of the great European powers. It was the first time in modern history that an Asian country had beaten a European one in a major war, and it sent shockwaves through the colonial world.

The peace treaty signed in Portsmouth, New Hampshire (brokered by President Theodore Roosevelt, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his efforts) granted Japan control of the South Manchuria Railway. This wasn't just a rail line—it was an economic lifeline running through some of the richest land in East Asia, connecting the port of Lüshun (known to Westerners as Port Arthur) to the city of Changchun.

But Japan didn't just want to run trains. Japanese officials claimed that their railway lease included all the rights Russia had previously extracted from China—essentially, the power to administer the entire railway zone as if it were Japanese territory. They stationed soldiers along the tracks, ostensibly as "railway guards," but these were regular army troops who frequently conducted military exercises well beyond the railway areas.

Manchuria was becoming a Japanese colony in everything but name.

A Country Pulling Itself Back Together

While Japan was consolidating its grip on Manchuria, China was trying to become a country again.

Since the fall of the Qing dynasty in 1912, China had splintered into a patchwork of territories controlled by competing warlords. The central government in Nanjing, led by Chiang Kai-shek and his Nationalist Party (the Kuomintang), was slowly reasserting control, but it was a messy, violent process.

Manchuria was controlled by the warlord Zhang Zuolin, a former bandit who had built a formidable military machine. Zhang tried to play off Russia and Japan against each other, extracting benefits from both while maintaining his independence. The Japanese, tired of his games, assassinated him in 1928 by blowing up his personal railway car.

His son, Zhang Xueliang—known as the "Young Marshal"—inherited control of Manchuria at the age of twenty-seven. Unlike his father, the younger Zhang was openly anti-Japanese. He aligned himself with Chiang Kai-shek's Nationalist government and began asserting Chinese sovereignty over Manchuria in ways that infuriated Tokyo.

In April 1931, Chiang and Zhang met in Nanjing and agreed to take a united stand. They would assert China's rights in Manchuria, regardless of Japanese objections.

Some Japanese officers had been watching these developments with growing alarm. They decided it was time to act.

The Men Behind the Plot

The conspiracy centered on two officers of the Kwantung Army—the Japanese military force stationed in Manchuria. Colonel Seishirō Itagaki and Lieutenant Colonel Kanji Ishiwara had concluded that Japan needed to seize Manchuria before China grew strong enough to resist, or before the Soviet Union—which had just demonstrated its military power by crushing Zhang Xueliang's forces in a brief border conflict—could intervene.

Their original plan was elegant in its simplicity: provoke the Chinese into attacking first. Stage some incident near the garrison, wait for Chinese soldiers to respond, and then use that response as justification for a "defensive" invasion.

But then Tokyo sent a general named Yoshitsugu Tatekawa to rein in the Kwantung Army's increasingly aggressive behavior. Itagaki and Ishiwara realized they had run out of time. They couldn't wait for the Chinese to be provoked. They would have to stage the attack themselves.

By May 31, 1931, the plan was complete. Four officers—Itagaki, Ishiwara, Colonel Kenji Doihara, and Major Takayoshi Tanaka—had worked out every detail. All they needed was to wait for the right moment.

The Night of September 18

Lieutenant Kawamoto placed his explosives near the tracks at around 10:20 in the evening. The detonation was unimpressive—it damaged only about five feet of rail on one side of the track. The southbound express from Changchun passed over the spot without incident and pulled into Shenyang station at 10:30, right on schedule.

None of this mattered. The explosion was never meant to destroy the railway. It was meant to provide a story.

By dawn, Japanese artillery positioned at an officers' club in Shenyang opened fire on the nearby Chinese garrison. Zhang Xueliang's small air force was destroyed on the ground. His soldiers, numbering about seven thousand, found themselves under attack by five hundred Japanese troops.

The Chinese garrison resisted, but they were overwhelmed. By evening, the fighting was over. The Japanese had captured Mukden at a cost of two dead. Five hundred Chinese soldiers had been killed.

The commander of the Kwantung Army, General Shigeru Honjō, was initially furious that his subordinates had launched an invasion without his permission. But Lieutenant Colonel Ishiwara talked him around. The deed was done. Better to embrace success than punish initiative. Honjō moved his headquarters to Mukden and called for reinforcements from Korea.

The General Who Didn't Fight

The most puzzling aspect of the Mukden Incident is why the Chinese didn't resist more effectively.

Zhang Xueliang commanded nearly a quarter million troops. He possessed what was considered the most modern arsenal in China, including tanks, about sixty combat aircraft, four thousand machine guns, and multiple artillery battalions. The Kwantung Army numbered only eleven thousand.

On paper, the Chinese should have crushed the Japanese invaders.

But Zhang Xueliang personally ordered his troops to stand down. When the Japanese attacked, Chinese soldiers were under instructions to store their weapons and avoid combat.

Why would a commander order his troops not to fight?

The answer involves a complex calculation that proved catastrophically wrong. Zhang wasn't even in Manchuria when the invasion began—he was in Beijing, raising money for flood relief after the devastating Yangtze River floods that had displaced tens of thousands of people. The Chinese government was simultaneously dealing with a breakaway faction in Guangzhou, Communist insurgencies in multiple provinces, and the flood disaster. Chiang Kai-shek had decided that internal unity had to come before confronting Japan.

More practically, Zhang knew that the Kwantung Army had massive reinforcements readily available in Korea, just across the border. His own forces were scattered across Manchuria, with more than half stationed south of the Great Wall in Hebei Province. Concentrating them to fight would take time—time the Japanese would not give him.

Furthermore, Japanese intelligence had thoroughly penetrated Zhang's command. His father had relied heavily on Japanese military advisers, and the Japanese knew the Northeastern Army intimately—its dispositions, its weaknesses, its officers' loyalties.

Finally, and perhaps most damningly, Zhang's troops were poorly trained, poorly fed, and poorly led. Their morale and loyalty were questionable at best. A fight against the disciplined Kwantung Army would likely end in disaster.

So Zhang chose not to fight. Chinese newspapers dubbed him "General Nonresistance," a nickname that would follow him for the rest of his life.

The World Watches and Does Nothing

The Chinese government, unable to resist militarily, turned to the international community.

On September 19—the day after the explosion—China appealed to the League of Nations, the predecessor to the United Nations. The League was supposed to maintain world peace by collective action against aggressors. Here was a clear case of aggression. Surely the international community would act.

The League did act, after a fashion. On October 24, it passed a resolution demanding that Japanese troops withdraw by November 16.

Japan simply ignored the resolution. The deadline passed. Nothing happened.

The League sent a commission, headed by a British earl named Victor Bulwer-Lytton, to investigate. The commission spent months traveling through Manchuria, gathering evidence, interviewing witnesses. Their report, published in October 1932, concluded that the invasion was not an act of self-defense, that Manchukuo was a puppet state created by Japanese military aggression, and that China's sovereignty should be restored.

The report was careful not to directly accuse Japan of staging the initial railway bombing, but it rejected Japan's justification for the invasion.

Japan's response was to quit the League of Nations in March 1933. The international community had called out Japanese aggression and Japan had simply walked away from the table.

The message was clear: the League of Nations could investigate, condemn, and issue reports, but it could not actually stop a determined aggressor. This lesson was not lost on other nations with territorial ambitions—particularly in Germany and Italy.

The Stimson Doctrine: Moral Force Without Physical Force

The United States, which had never joined the League of Nations, tried its own approach.

On January 7, 1932, Secretary of State Henry Stimson announced what became known as the Stimson Doctrine: the United States would refuse to recognize any government established as a result of Japanese actions in Manchuria. America would not accept Manchukuo as a legitimate state.

This was meant to be a principled stand. In practice, it was a toothless gesture. The Japanese didn't need American recognition to extract Manchuria's coal, iron, and soybeans. The puppet state of Manchukuo functioned perfectly well without a seat at diplomatic tables.

The Stimson Doctrine established an important principle—that conquest should not be rewarded with legitimacy—but it did nothing to help the millions of Chinese now living under Japanese occupation.

The Puppet Emperor

In March 1932, just five months after the Mukden Incident, Japan formally established Manchukuo and installed a figurehead to give the new state a veneer of legitimacy.

They chose Puyi, the last emperor of China.

Puyi had been forced to abdicate in 1912, at the age of six, when the Qing dynasty fell. He had lived a strange, sheltered existence ever since, treated as a living relic of China's imperial past. Now the Japanese offered him a chance to be an emperor again—of a sort.

Colonel Kenji Doihara, one of the original Mukden conspirators, helped sell Puyi on the arrangement. He told the former emperor that Chinese troops had surrendered so quickly because they remained secretly loyal to him. It was a transparent lie, but Puyi, desperate to reclaim some shadow of his former glory, apparently believed it—or at least convinced himself he did.

Manchukuo was, of course, a Japanese colony in all but name. Puyi had no real power. Japanese officials controlled the government, the economy, and the military. But the fiction of Manchurian independence allowed Japan to maintain that it hadn't simply seized Chinese territory.

The Conspiracy Unravels—Eventually

For years, the Japanese government maintained the fiction that the Mukden Incident was a genuine Chinese attack, and that the invasion was a justified response.

After Japan's defeat in World War Two, the truth came out. Post-war investigations confirmed that the bomb planted by Lieutenant Kawamoto had actually failed to explode properly and had to be replaced with a backup. The entire incident had been a staged performance.

Today, even Japanese sources acknowledge this. The Yūshūkan museum, located within the controversial Yasukuni Shrine in Tokyo—a shrine that honors Japan's war dead, including several convicted war criminals—places the blame for the Mukden Incident squarely on members of the Kwantung Army.

The Chinese government has been considerably more direct. A museum in Shenyang, opened on the sixtieth anniversary of the incident in 1991, presents extensive evidence of Japanese responsibility. September 18 is commemorated annually in China as a day of national humiliation—a reminder of a time when foreign powers could carve up Chinese territory with impunity.

Who Really Gave the Orders?

One question has never been fully resolved: how high did the conspiracy go?

The conventional story—the one Japan officially told for decades—was that a handful of "hot-headed young officers" had acted without authorization, dragging their country into an invasion that the civilian government had never approved.

Historian David Bergamini, in his controversial 1971 book Japan's Imperial Conspiracy, argued that this story was itself a deception—that the highest levels of the Japanese government, possibly including Emperor Hirohito himself, had known about and approved the plot in advance.

Other historians have reached a middle position: that senior commanders may not have explicitly ordered the operation, but they created conditions in which field officers knew their initiative would be rewarded. They tacitly allowed subordinates to proceed, maintaining plausible deniability, and then endorsed the results once success was assured.

This pattern—where aggressive actions are neither ordered nor forbidden, allowing leaders to claim innocence while benefiting from the results—would repeat itself throughout Japan's expansion in the 1930s.

The Road to World War

The Mukden Incident was not the beginning of Japanese expansion—that process had been underway since the 1890s. And it was not the immediate cause of World War Two in Asia—that would come in 1937, when a skirmish at the Marco Polo Bridge outside Beijing triggered a full-scale Japanese invasion of China proper.

But Mukden was a turning point. It demonstrated that the international community would not—or could not—stop a major power from seizing territory through military force. The League of Nations, designed to prevent exactly this kind of aggression, had been shown to be powerless.

This lesson emboldened not only Japan but also Mussolini's Italy, which invaded Ethiopia in 1935, and Hitler's Germany, which remilitarized the Rhineland in 1936 and annexed Austria and Czechoslovakia in 1938. Each time, the pattern established at Mukden repeated: condemnation without consequences.

By the time the Western democracies decided that aggression must be stopped by force, it was 1939, and the world was at war.

A Train That Ran On Time

The most darkly ironic detail of the Mukden Incident may be this: the whole scheme was nearly exposed by Japanese efficiency.

The explosion was supposed to look like a devastating attack on a vital railway. Instead, it was so weak that a train passed over the "destroyed" track within minutes and arrived at the station exactly on schedule.

Anyone paying close attention would have realized immediately that the attack was fake. The damage was trivial. The railway was obviously intact.

But no one was paying close attention—or at least, no one who mattered. The Japanese army had its pretext, the invasion was already underway, and the trains, as they say, ran on time.

Sometimes the most consequential lies are the ones nobody bothers to check.