Sessions 1 and 2: Combatant Forces on the Eve of War

The first day's sessions centered on discussions of the condition of the armies of the three major combatants in the war -- the Imperial Japanese Army; the Chinese Nationalist Army, and the Chinese communist forces, eventually designated the Eighth Route Army. Professor Edward DREA (contract historian with the Department of Defense), led off with an illuminating paper on the Japanese army on the eve of the war. One of the key points in his monograph was his contention that the Japanese army was not prepared to fight the war into which it entered, either in terms of planning, intelligence about Chinese units, or disposition of army units on the continent, (most of which were positioned along the Manchurian-Soviet border, preparing for an eventual showdown with the Soviet army, when the war broke out.)

These assertions soon led to a heated debate on the first controversial issue raised at the conference: the issue of whether the Sino-Japanese war started by accident or by calculation. Drea's presentation, supported by most of the Japanese participants, was that the Japanese army, through arrogance and ignorance, blundered into a war which was not in its interest and which it was not prepared to fight. To the Chinese participants this argument seemed specious. Noting the evolution of a modern Japanese army's general staff system, they refused to believe that Japan 's rapid advances in 1937 in China were not the result of long years of planning. Chinese historians also pointed to Japan 's long history of aggression in China and argued that, even if Japan saw the Soviet Union as its strongest enemy, its strategic goal had continued to be the domination of China , not the defeat of the Soviet Union .

The papers by LIU Fenghan (Faculty of the Academia Sinica, Taipei ) on the Chinese Nationalist Army on the eve of the war and by TUO Ping (Party Central Committee, Beijing ) on Chinese communist forces early on in the war, took the conference in a different direction. Discussion following their papers highlighted the scale and complexity of Chinese armies at the outset of the war. Not only were there the Nationalist Army and the Chinese armed forces, but there existed a whole range of regional forces. Even within the Nationalist Army there was no single model, but rather a mixture of military patterns, some German, some Soviet, and some Japanese. These considerations inevitably complicated command and control in the Nationalist Army. Such a diversity of military models also spawned a variety of military attitudes toward Japan , though the Chinese participants at the conference were emphatic that resistance to Japan was a broadly shared goal, regardless of the militarily and political divisions in China and disagreements about how to respond to the Japanese challenge.