One day when I came home from school, a woman who didn’t speak English was in our living room sewing a dress on my mother’s sewing machine. My mother spoke to her by using the dictionary she’d bought for her Spanish class. After the woman left, my mother said she was from Barcelona. Her husband had been a doctor, like my father, but he’d been killed in one of Franco’s air raids. Now she was a refugee and had to support herself by making dresses.
I knew about the bombings of Barcelona from the Horrors of War cards. It was the bombings of civilians in Spanish cities that turned the card-writers against Franco and made them start calling the government forces Loyalists instead of Leftists. Card number 115 showed a raid on March 17, 1938, in which “six of Franco’s bombers roared over Barcelona.” One bomb demolished three busses and a trolley car. One of the busses was blown into the air and the front of the card showed it lying on top of the trolley car. The driver had been blown from his seat by the force of the blast, but his hands were still attached to the steering wheel. You could see them gripping it. The card said they were gripping it so tightly they had to be pried off.
That was the first time I’d felt a personal connection with a scene depicted on one of the cards. The woman from Barcelona came back many times to use our sewing machine. I tried to ask about the bus driver’s hands, but she didn’t understand English. I didn’t learn Spanish till years later, so I never got the chance.
We began getting refugees from China and other parts of Europe too. That same year a tall Chinese girl named Stella came into second grade. She was very beautiful and very smart and she had the best penmanship in the class. They’d given us wooden pens and little steel nibs that you had to fit into a circular cut on the bottom of the pen. The steel nib was split at the point so it would pick up ink when you dipped it into the inkwell in the upper right hand corner of your desk. The nib was scratchy and hard to write with, especially when you came to capital “G”s and “S”s. I glanced at Stella’s yellow practice sheet one day and remember seeing a perfect “S” at the top, where she’d written her name. It was exactly like the “S” on the Palmer Method chart thumb tacked above the blackboard at the front of the room.
Another morning she played a piano piece for the lower grade Assembly. The Principal said it was a piano sonata by Beethoven. My mother was making me take piano lessons at the time and Stella played much better than my teacher did. I told my mother that, but she made me continue the lessons until one day we went to the movies and my piano teacher was kissing her boy friend two rows in front of us.
The Horrors of War Cards occasionally digressed to the wars in Spain and Ethiopia but they always returned to the Sino-Japanese War and to Japan’s steady expansion westward across China. They followed the Imperial Japanese Army from Shanghai and Nanking to Suchow and Hankow (now Wuhan) and then south to Canton (now Guangzhou) and the port cities along the southern coast. By 1940, British Hong Kong was the only port not under Japanese control.
Japan’s expansion in China had begun, not in 1937 as the Horrors of War Cards said, but in 1895, after the first Sino-Japanese War. After that war, China gave up control of Korea, ceded Taiwan and leased the Liaodong Peninsula with Port Arthur (now Dalian) to Japan. In addition, Japan got the South Manchurian railroad from Port Arthur to Manchuria, including the right to station troops in Manchuria to protect the railroad. Port Arthur was across the Bay of Korea from Pyongyang and with Port Arthur to its west, and Kyushu a hundred miles across the Korean Strait to its east, Korea, though nominally independent, became a de facto protectorate of Japan.
Russia had completed the Trans-Siberian railroad to the summer-only port of Vladivostok and was flexing its muscles eastward by then. Vladivostok lay just across the Sea of Japan from the Japanese Islands, and during trade negotiations, Russia pressured Japan into sub-leasing Port Arthur to them. As negotiations continued, Russia began fortifying Port Arthur, which unlike Vladivostok, was an all-year-round-port. Next, Russia began basing their Pacific fleet there. Then, they started building a branch railroad to connect Port Arthur with their Trans-Siberian track. After that, they moved gunboats into the port of Inchon and began negotiating mining and forestry concessions from Korea. Japan had learned the persuasive power of boats armed with heavy cannon from Commodore Perry’s visits to Tokyo Bay in 1853 and 1854. In 1904, without declaring war, Japan launched a surprise attack on Port Arthur, and on the Russian warships anchored at Inchon.
Just as in 1941, when during trade negotiations with the U.S., Japan destroyed America’s Pacific fleet at Pearl Harbor, they sank the Russian ships at Inchon and trapped and destroyed Russia’s Pacific fleet at Port Arthur. Through Inchon, they invaded Korea, marched to Seoul, and got Korea to sign a formal protectorate treaty.
In 1905, Theodore Roosevelt helped negotiate the Treaty of Portsmouth to end the Russo-Japanese war, and signed a secret codicil granting Japan a free hand in Korea in return for Japan’s acceptance of a free hand for the United States in the Philippines. (U.S. forces, led by Admiral Dewey and General Arthur MacArthur had occupied the Philippines during the Spanish American War, and afterwards purchased rights to the Islands from Spain.)
In 1910 Japan forced Korea into being annexed into the Japanese Empire. That began an occupation that lasted until 1945. In 1931, Japan occupied Manchuria after the “Mukden (now Shenyang) Incident.” A five-foot section of the South Manchurian railroad was blown up. Japan blamed Chinese terrorists, but the superficiality of the damage and the rapidity and coordination of Japan’s response made the incident appear contrived. In “retaliation,” Japan occupied Manchuria and established it as a Japanese puppet state under the name of Manchukuo.
The U.S. didn’t react. Our defensive perimeter in the Pacific ran from Alaska to Hawaii to the Panama Canal. It did not include any part of the Asian mainland and it no longer included even the Philippines. In 1934, Congress had granted the Islands commonwealth status and promised them full independence in 1946.
Cards 241-254 depicted scenes from the month-long border clash between Japan and the Soviet Union, in July and August of 1938. It was known as the Battle of Lake Khasan and was fought in a disputed area in the Changkufeng Hills where the borders of Korea, Manchuria and Siberia meet. The armies used pre-World War II cannon, tanks, planes and small arms in a battle for territory that had neither strategic nor economic importance.
Although the battle was insignificant in itself, those with eyes to see noted the aggressiveness of the Japanese Army and that army’s ability to wage tank and artillery war against a European foe. They also noted the savagery of Joseph Stalin who purged, tortured and executed Soviet commanders who lost battles. He used that same savagery on lower rank officers, such as the Soviet tank commander who retreated and was executed by firing squad in card number 252.
Even though the Philippines were outside the American defensive perimeter and were deemed indefensible by the War Department, President Franklin Roosevelt sent General Douglas MacArthur there in 1935, with Major Dwight D. Eisenhower as his aide. They were to act as military advisors to President Quezon. Douglas MacArthur, son of General Arthur MacArthur had been stationed in the Philippines during the1920s. He’d developed a plan of defense that involved a retreat to Bataan Peninsula, which MacArthur had personally surveyed, and, if necessary, a final retreat to the impregnable island fortress of Corregidor, called “The Rock.”
On his return in 1935, MacArthur, with the assistance of Eisenhower, developed a new Ten Year Plan designed to turn the Philippines into “The Switzerland of the Pacific.” It contemplated building a Filipino naval force of fifty torpedo boats and an air force of two hundred fifty planes that would make invasion of Luzon, the site of Manila, too costly to attempt. He persuaded President Quezon to agree to build a forty-division army over ten years at the rate of four ten-thousand-man divisions per year. Every Filipino, twenty-one to fifty, would be conscripted and given training. The plan was budgeted at twenty-five million dollars a year.
This new plan had opponents in the Roosevelt Administration and in Congress over worries about provoking Japan and over reluctance to put military power into the hands of the politically ambitious MacArthur. Critics attacked the plan by engineering MacArthur’s resignation from the U.S. Army at the end of 1937. That reduced his influence with the War Department and prevented his procuring the American-made mines, coastal defense cannon and ammunition required to defend the Islands.
That apparent change of heart on the part of Washington caused Quezon to doubt the reliability of American support. He immediately traveled to Japan to seek neutrality guarantees and, as a sign of good faith to Japan, cut MacArthur’s twenty-five million dollar per year defense budget to three million.
In 1940 France surrendered to Germany and Japan signed the Tripartite Mutual Defense Pact with Germany and Italy. In July of 1941, Japan moved its forces into French Indo-China (now Vietnam). Their troops occupied Saigon, and their navy moved into Camranh Bay, flanking the Philippines and exposing Thailand and the Dutch East Indies to attack.
Now, at last, President Roosevelt and the War Department sprang into action and appointed MacArthur General of the Far East Command. MacArthur merged the 11,792 Filipino Scouts, the 10,560 U.S. soldiers, mostly under the command of General Jonathan M. Wainwright, and the 80,000 pith-helmeted members of the nascent Filipino Defense Forces into a single command. Some of the Filipinos were armed with the old Enfield Rifles, but many had never fired any weapon. MacArthur’s under-strength army was backed by an under-strength U.S. Naval Force consisting of three cruisers, thirteen destroyers, eighteen submarines and six PT-boats.
To oppose these forces, Japan had a six-million-man army battle-hardened in the war with China. The army had 1500 planes. The Japanese Navy had ten aircraft carriers, ten battleships, thirty-eight cruisers, one hundred twelve destroyers, sixty-five submarines and 1400 planes.
Roosevelt combined his military moves with sanctions. He froze all Japanese assets in the United States, closed the Panama Canal to Japanese shipping, and embargoed all shipments of oil, iron and rubber to Japan, which had no native suppy of these commodities. Great Britain and Holland joined in the embargo and the three allies settled back to wait for Japan to come to its senses.
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