Quick questions on The Marco Polo Bridge Incident and the Second Sino-Japanese War 1937-1941: HSC Modern History National Study China

The Marco Polo Bridge (Lugouqiao) crossing of the Yongding River, ten miles west of Beiping, was the only Beiping-Hankou Railway crossing. Under the Boxer Protocol (1901) Japanese troops were stationed in the area. On the night of 7 July 1937 a Japanese soldier went missing during a night exercise. The Japanese garrison commander demanded entry to the walled town of Wanping; the Chinese garrison refused.

Chiang chose to open a second front at Shanghai to internationalise the war and protect his Yangtze Valley heartland. The Battle of Shanghai (13 August to 26 November 1937) drew in his best German-trained divisions (around 700,000 KMT troops in total) against around 300,000 Japanese.

Japanese forces under General Matsui Iwane took Nanjing on 13 December 1937. The retreating KMT failed to organise an evacuation or a defence of the population.

Chiang's government moved to Wuhan, then in October 1938 to Chongqing in Sichuan. To slow the Japanese advance toward Wuhan, KMT engineers deliberately breached the Yellow River dykes at Huayuankou on 9 June 1938. The flood spread across three provinces, drowned perhaps 800,000 Chinese, displaced 4 million, and slowed but did not stop the Japanese.

By 1939 the war had entered a long stalemate. Japan held the "points and lines" (cities and railways) of the east. The KMT held Chongqing and the south-west. Communist base areas grew rapidly behind Japanese lines (covered in the Yan'an dot point).

Wang Jingwei, KMT veteran and Chiang's rival, defected from Chongqing in December 1938. He set up a "reorganised" KMT government at Nanjing in March 1940 under Japanese tutelage. Wang's regime held nominal authority in Japanese-occupied China; in practice the Kwantung Army and the Japanese Northern China Area Army ran the territory. Wang died of natural causes in November 1944; the regime collapsed at the Japanese surrender.

The Soviet Union supplied the KMT extensively from 1937 to 1941: around 1,000 aircraft, 2,000 pilots and technicians, and a credit of around 250 million US dollars. The "Burma Road" (completed November 1938) carried supplies from Rangoon to Kunming.

Chongqing endured the longest sustained aerial bombing of any city in the war. Between February 1938 and August 1943 Japanese air raids killed around 12,000 and destroyed much of the city. The KMT state moved to caves and tunnels; ministries operated underground.

Rana Mitter (China's War with Japan, 2013; published in the US as Forgotten Ally) is the major rehabilitation of the KMT war effort, drawing on Chiang's diaries.

It was three wars in one: KMT-Japan in the south-west, CCP-Japan in the north and base areas, and KMT-CCP rivalry throughout.

Around 3.2 million KMT soldiers were killed or wounded in the war. The CCP figure was around 580,000. The KMT did most of the fighting; the CCP did the political work.

1927 was Chiang's establishment of the Nationalist Government there; 1937-1938 was the city's destruction and the massacre.