Why Did Hitler Arm China Against Japan?

Hitler's largest military partner in

Asia wasn't Japan. It was [music] China.

For half a decade, the partnership ran

so deep that when Japanese troops

attacked Shanghai in 1937, they collided

with something they had never seen in

Asia, a Chinese army that fought [music]

like a European one.

Then in 1938, Hitler made his choice. He

recognized Manuko. He shut the program

down. He handed the future of Asia to

Tokyo.

It was one of the worst strategic

[music] trades of his career, a country

of 400 million people with a battlefield

that already pinned down the Imperial

Japanese Army swapped for an island

nation that would less than [music] 4

years later drag him into a war with the

United States.

So why [music] did Hitler get China so

wrong?

To answer that, I want to tell you four

things. Why Berlin and Nanjing found

each other in the first place. How that

partnership [music] changed the opening

months of the SinoJapanese War and gave

the Japanese Marines in Shanghai [music]

the worst surprise of the war's opening

months.

why Hitler tore it all up in February of

1938

and what [music] that decision actually

cost him four years later in a war he

was still pretending he could win.

Let's start at the beginning. Versailles

June 1919.

The treaty caps the German army at

100,000 men. No conscription, no tanks,

no air force, no general staff. The

largest army in Europe is now the

smallest professional [music] force on

the continent.

The human consequence is what matters

here. Tens of thousands of professional

officers, many of them veterans of the

Stormtrooper battalions of 1918, are out

of work. They sit in cafes in Munich and

Berlin, and they wait for someone to

need them again.

6,000 mi to the east, someone does.

Chiang Kaishek is the president [music]

of a country he does not actually

control. His rit runs across maybe a

fifth of his territory. Warlord armies

hold the west and the north. A communist

insurgency simmers [music] in the south.

From the northeast, the pressure of an

imperial Japan that has already taken

Manuria and is openly [music] planning

to take more. He needs a modern army. He

needs it fast. and he [music] does not

trust the British, the French or the

Americans to build it for him.

The Germans have [music] lost everything

in Europe. They have nothing to gain by

partitioning China and they have sitting

in those cafes the most experienced

infantry tacticians on earth.

Chang himself had studied at the

Imperial Military Academy [music] in

Tokyo before the First World War. He

spoke Japanese fluently. He admired

German efficiency and he was watching

with growing alarm the country whose

language he spoke begin preparing to

invade his own. The first German

officers arrived in 1927.

Quietly as private contractors in

unmarked civilian clothes. The problem

was that Chang [music] could not pay

them in cash. His treasury was empty.

Whatever the Germans were going to

provide, rifles, artillery, training,

the architecture of a modern army, China

would have to pay for it in something

other than money.

What China [music] had instead was

metal. Specifically, it had tungsten,

wolffrram in German, a gray black

mineral pulled out of the mountains of

Djang [music] Xi and Guangong. And in

the early 1930s, no other country on

Earth produced more of it. China [music]

was for all practical purposes the

world's tungsten mine.

Tungsten matters because of what it does

inside a modern arms industry. It is the

metal that makes armor-piercing [music]

shells punch through tank steel. It is

the metal in the drill bits [music] and

the lathe tools that machine the

precision parts of a rifle, an anti-tank

gun, a submarine propeller. Without

tungsten, your factories cannot

mass-roduce modern weapons.

With tungsten, they run.

In 1933, [music]

when Adolf Hitler took power and began

rearming Germany in violation of the

Versailles Treaty, [music] this fact was

on the desk of every economist in the

German war ministry. The Reich was

preparing for a war it knew was coming.

It needed tungsten by the ton. No

European source could supply it.

China had tungsten. China needed an

army. In January of 1934, an office in

Berlin registered [music] a new company.

Its name was the Handleskazel Shaft Fure

[music] Industrial Product, the trade

company for industrial products. The

acronym [music] was H A P R O. On paper,

a private firm. In practice, a creation

[music] of the German war ministry and a

consortium of German industrial giants,

Kroo Rin Metal, the Ottowolf Group,

designed to move weapons and machine

tools out of Germany and raw materials

in without anyone in Geneva noticing

that Hitler's still secret rearmament

had a foreign supplier.

The first formal agreement was signed on

the 23rd of August, 1934.

Tungsten and antimony out, weapons and

machinery in. No cash, no debt, pure

barter.

A revised and larger version, the

agreement history remembers as the hap

agreement was signed on the 8th of April

1936.

On top of the barter, the German war

ministry extended a credit line of 100

million rice marks, enough to buy China

the spine of a modern army.

The most important number in the entire

arrangement, though, [music] was a price

curve. Between 1932 and 1936,

the world [music] price of tungsten more

than doubled. Every ton of ore China

shipped to Hamburg in 1936

bought twice the German [music]

artillery it would have bought four

years earlier. The Germans got their

armor-piercing shells. The Chinese got

their elite divisions. And the longer

the deal ran, the better it looked from

Nanjing.

By 1936, the partnership had outgrown a

series of barter contracts. China and

Germany jointly launched a three-year

industrial plan, steel works in Hube,

machine tool plants in Hunan, chemical

factories in Sichuan, deep in the

Chinese interior behind the Yangze

gorges where no Japanese bomber could

reach. The infrastructure of a war

economy [music] was being built by

Germans with Chinese tungsten in a

country preparing for a war against

Germany's future ally.

But this was just paper. Trade

agreements do not win battles. Treaties

do not stop infantry.

By the time the first M35 Stalhelm was

lifted off a crate in Shanghai Harbor,

the question that mattered was not what

Berlin and Nanjing had signed. The

question was who on the ground in China

would actually take 80,000 peasant

conscripts and turn them into the army

that would shock the Japanese marines

[music] in Chape. 3 years later,

the five Germans who [music] built

Chiang Kai-shek's army arrived in this

order.

Colonel Max Bower came in 1927,

a former staff officer of Eric Ludenorf,

who had spent the 1920s as a freelance

military adviser for hire Argentina,

Spain, [music] Soviet Russia. Two years

after his arrival in Nanjing, Bower

caught smallox and died. He never went

home.

After Bower, Major General Hammon

Krebel, a Munich PCH veteran who in 1924

had served his prison sentence in the

cell next to a man named Adolf [music]

Hitler. Kel ran the mission for a year

and left almost no mark.

Lieutenant General Gayog [music] Vetszel

took over in 1930. Over the next four

years, he built the first demonstration

brigades, small Chinese [music]

formations, German trained, used to

convince Chang's other commanders that

the new methods actually worked.

And then in 1933

came the man whose name historians

remember.

Colonel General Hans Fonict was the

architect of the postwar Reichkes fair.

The general who had taken the 100,000man

army Versailles left Germany and built

it into a leadership cadre capable of

expanding tenfold the moment the limits

came off. He understood as few generals

on earth did how to build an army from

blueprints.

On his second visit to China in 1934,

see [music] brought with him the man who

would actually do the work. His name was

Alexander Fonfalenhausen.

He arrived at 55 and stayed for 4 years.

By the time Falenhausen reached Nanjing,

[music] he was already on his third tour

in Asia. He had fought in the Boxer

Rebellion [music] as a young lieutenant

in 1900. As a captain, he had served as

Imperial Germany's military ataché in

Tokyo. And there he had learned to speak

Japanese fluently. When he and [music]

Chiang Kaishek met for the first time in

Nanjing, the two men did not bother with

an interpreter. They spoke Japanese.

[music] Chang's language from his own

military academy years in Tokyo.

Falenhousen's from his years as a German

officer at the same court. Both knew the

language well. both knew the country it

belonged to was preparing to invade

China. [music]

Falenhausen had also fought a war. In

1917, he had served as chief of staff of

the Turkish 7th Army in Palestine,

fighting [music] Alanb's British advance

and earning the poor limmerit, the

highest military honor the German Empire

awarded.

He was by [music] any measure one of the

most experienced soldiers Hitler's

Germany still had.

And he wanted very badly to be somewhere

else.

On the 30th of June 1934, Falenhausen's

[music] first summer in China, the SS

murdered his brother.

Hans Yakim Fonfalenhausen [music] was an

SA officer, a member of Hitler's brown

shirt paramilitary, killed in his Berlin

apartment during the night of the long

knives. He was one of roughly 150

[music] victims of Hitler's purge of his

own movement. The news [music] reached

Alexander in Nanjing some weeks later.

He attended no funeral. He sent no

public [music] statement. He did however

quietly write to his superiors in Berlin

that he intended to extend his contract

with the Chinese government.

From that summer onward, the mission to

China was Alexander vonfalenhausen's

escape from Adolf [music] Hitler's

Germany. The longer he stayed in Asia,

the longer he did not have to return to

a country that had murdered his brother

and put a former Lance corporal in

charge of the army he had served for 35

years.

He fought to [music] make the mission

succeed. In December of 1934, the plan

was formalized.

60 new divisions, each one 10,000 men.

Each one trained from scratch by German

officers equipped with German [music]

weapons drilled in German tactics.

Behind them, 60 more, the reformed

divisions, Chinese armed with two German

advisers per division, working toward

the same standard.

On paper, an army of 600,000 elite

troops by 1942.

the spine of a force that could fight

Japan to a stalemate, hold the coast,

and force a negotiated peace.

It was precisely the war Falconhausen

knew was coming.

The reality, by July of 1937, [music]

was more modest.

20 divisions were partly ready. Eight

were fully trained, the so-called

General Lissimo's own. Roughly 80,000

men, three infantry regiments per

division, a 75 mm field artillery

battalion, a 37 mm anti-tank company,

anti-aircraft platoon, [music]

engineers, and signals. Stormtroop

infiltration tactics inherited directly

from the trenches of 1918. The same

methods that had nearly won Germany the

First World War, now drilled into

Chinese conscripts on the [music]

Yangzey. They wore M35 Stalhelms. They

carried [music] mouser pattern rifles,

most of them Chinese-built copies from

the Hanyang arsenal. They moved like

Reichkes [music] platoon.

Behind them, the rest of China's army,

about 2 million men in nominal uniform,

still drilled [music] like it was 1911.

Cotton tunics, bolt-action rifles older

than the men who carried them, officers

who could not read maps.

Falenhousen's plan was that the elite 8

would absorb the first Japanese blow.

The reformed 20 would slow the advance.

The obsolete 2 million would buy time,

years of attrition, while Japan's

economy broke under the weight of an

unwinable war.

It might have worked, but the cloud had

already formed in Berlin.

On the 25th of November 1936,

Germany and Japan signed the

anti-commonturn pact. On its face, a

defensive arrangement against the Soviet

Union. In practice, the first time

Hitler's Germany had publicly committed

itself in writing [music] to the country

Falenhausen's Chinese army was preparing

to fight. Falenhausen read the news in

his office in Nanjing. [music]

He said nothing publicly. The work

continued. The crates [music] kept

arriving from Hamorg.

But in a back office in Berlin, a former

champagne salesman who had become

Hitler's unofficial foreign affairs

adviser [music] was already pulling at

the threads of the whole arrangement.

His name was Yahim Fon Ribbentrop. We

come back to him in a little while.

The first shot was fired 600 m to the

north. On the night of the 7th of July

1937,

Japanese [music] troops on a training

exercise outside Beijing claimed they

had been fired upon by Chinese soldiers.

They demanded the right to search a

nearby town. The Chinese garrison

refused. Sometime before dawn, the

firing started in earnest. The skirmish

at the Marco Polo Bridge has been called

staged, accidental, and inevitable. By

daylight on the 8th of July, two of the

great armies of Asia were shooting at

each other and the SinoJapanese [music]

war had begun.

For 5 weeks, the fighting stayed in the

[music] north. Then on the 9th of August

in Shanghai, a Japanese sublutenant

named Isao [music] Oyama drove with a

single sailor to Hongcha Aerod Drrome,

Chinese controlled [music] territory off

limits to Japanese forces under the 1932

ceasefire. The Chinese Peace

Preservation Corps stopped him at the

gate. By the time the bodies were

recovered, [music] the lieutenant, his

driver, and a Chinese guard were all

dead. What had actually happened is

still disputed. [music]

What happened next was not.

On the 13th of August, 3,000 Japanese

Marines of the Special Naval Landing

Force took up positions [music] along

the perimeter of the International

Settlement. They were lightly armed.

They expected to hold ground until

reinforcements landed from the sea,

closing on them from the west and the

north with the Chinese [music] 87th and

88th divisions. The two best units in

Chiang Kai-shek's army, 80,000 men with

the General Eimo's mandate,

Falenhausen's tactics, [music]

and the equipment of a German infantry

division.

Falenhausen's plan was a [music] German

plan. Hit before the enemy can react.

concentrate. [music]

Strike a single decisive blow that ends

the campaign before it begins. The

Germans had a word for it. Enshungl,

the decisive battle. In 1914, the same

concept had carried the Imperial German

army to within 40 mi of Paris. [music]

In 1940, it would carry the Vermach to

the English Channel in 6 weeks. In 1937,

Falenhausen wanted Changang to push

3,000 Japanese Marines into the Hangpoo

River before [music] reinforcements

could land. He had 3 days. The first

Chinese assault on the 14th of August

[music] was a confused affair. Air

support arrived late. Ground attacks

were peacemeal [music]

and by sunset the Japanese marines had

pulled back into their fortified blocks

inside the settlement perimeter and

held.

Chang and his commanders met that

[music] night to plan a second blow.

2 days later on the 17th of August

[music] came Operation Iron Fist. It was

a perfect German stormtroop attack. The

87th and 88th divisions launched a heavy

artillery preparation at dawn. The

infantry moved while the dust was still

in the air before the Japanese marines

could [music] come up from cover. Three

rifle squads bounded forward in pairs,

leapfrogging through alleys and

warehouse yards, encircling Japanese

strong [music] points rather than

charging them headon. For 12 hours, it

worked.

Then the trap [music] closed, but not

the one the Chinese had planned. The

trap was geographic.

The northern boundary of the Chinese

attack ran along the southern edge of

the international settlement. [music]

The British and French and American extr

territorial zone where by treaty no

Chinese army was [music] permitted to

fight. The Japanese knew it. They used

the settlement as a sanctuary on their

own flank, free to fire from the line

and impossible to flank back through.

Every encirclement the Chinese drew on a

[music] map ran into the same reality. A

thousand yards of neutral territory

[music] they could not cross.

At the Bazi Bridge, the 88th Division

was caught by Japanese light tanks

flanking from three directions and lost

most of an infantry battalion in an

afternoon. By dawn on the 18th, [music]

the attack had been called off. The next

morning, the 36th Division, the third of

the elite German trained units newly

arrived, attacks the [music] docks at Hi

Shan with armor for the first time. They

had no doctrine for [music] tank

infantry coordination. The infantry

advanced too far ahead of the tanks. The

tanks lost [music] their infantry screen

and were knocked out one by one. In a

single morning, the 36th Division lost

[music] over 90 officers and a thousand

men.

3 days later, Chinese tanks finally

broke through to the last street before

the Hangpoo Warves. The river was 60

yard beyond. The Japanese marines were

on the seaw wall behind concrete 10 ft

thick. [music]

Chinese artillery could not breach it.

Chinese infantry could not approach it.

60 yard.

They could not cross 60 yards.

The window was closed.

The next day, [music] the first ships of

the Japanese reinforcement convoy

entered the Hangpoo.

After the 22nd of August, the calculus

of the battle changed completely.

Japanese reinforcements began arriving

in waves. 1,400 more Marines from

Manuria on the 18th. then divisions from

the home islands. By the end of October,

the Imperial Japanese Army would have

committed 300,000

soldiers to the city, supported by 700

artillery pieces [music] and 400

aircraft. Chiang Kaishek poured his army

into the same urban grinder.

He had a choice that fall. He could have

withdrawn to the line of fortifications

Falconhausen had built [music] between

Shanghai and Nanjing and fought the

Japanese on terrain of his own choosing.

He chose instead to commit everything to

Shanghai. The reason was not military.

It was diplomatic.

On the 6th of November, the signitories

of the nine power treaty were scheduled

to meet in Brussels to [music] discuss

the situation in China. Chang hoped to

walk into that conference with a clear

case. Japanese aggression had destroyed

Shanghai, violated the treaty, and

demanded a western response. For the

case to land, the West needed to see

China bleed. So Chang [music] fed his

army into Shanghai,

700,000 men in total. The 87th, the

88th, the 36th, [music]

the rest of the German trained corps.

the reformed divisions behind them, then

the warlord [music] units, then the

conscripts.

Three months of urban fighting.

Falconhausen was at the front the entire

time. The terms of the German military

mission [music] were clear, and Berlin

had reminded its officers of those terms

in writing more than once. They were

private contractors in foreign [music]

employee. They were to stay behind the

lines in headquarters providing tactical

guidance [music] to Chinese commanders.

Falconhausen ignored the order for weeks

at a time. He was at Luoden on the

northern flank of the Shanghai perimeter

where the Chinese line was thinnest and

the Japanese pressure heaviest. He wore

a Chinese army uniform. By his own later

account, he survived for days at a time

on hard-boiled eggs and cognac.

69 other German advisers of every rank

from second lieutenant to lieutenant

[music] general were with him on the

line.

They had been warned. They engaged

anyway.

When Japanese marines began [music]

calling the fight at Shanghai the German

war, they were not entirely wrong.

The Brussels conference opened on

schedule. It accomplished nothing. The

Western [music] powers could not agree

on a response, issued a statement of

concern, and adjourned. 2 days later,

the Chinese line at Da Chang collapsed

under the weight of Japanese armor and

air power. The retreat from Shanghai

began. By the 26th of October, Chinese

resistance in the northern district of

Ja was [music] finished. Chang had

ordered a general withdrawal across Sujo

Creek into [music] the western suburbs.

He kept one battalion behind.

420 men of the 88th Division's [music]

524th regiment took up positions inside

a six-story concrete warehouse on

[music] the north bank of the creek. The

warehouse had been the 88th Division's

headquarters until the previous week. It

still held food, medical supplies, and

ammunition. Each man was issued a mouser

rifle, 300 rounds of ammunition,

grenades, a gas mask, and an M-35

Stallhelm. The defenders had 27 light

machine guns and four Maxims. No

artillery, no support.

Across 60 ft of dirty water [music] on

the south bank of Sujo Creek, the

western journalists, the foreign

businessmen, and the soldiers of the

British Army garrison of the

international settlement watched.

The siege of the Seihong Warehouse

lasted from the 26th of October to the

1st of November, 1937.

6 days. The Japanese committed two

infantry regiments, light tanks, and

field artillery against 420 Chinese

soldiers in a concrete [music] box.

35 of the defenders were killed. The

rest withdrew on Chang's [music] order

across a bridge into the British

concession on the night of the 1st of

November.

The Chinese nationalist propaganda

machine called them the 800 heroes.

The real number was 420.

The propaganda did not really matter.

What mattered was the funnel.

In August of 1937, Falconhausen's elite

German trained Chinese army numbered

80,000 men. By the end of October, 420

of them were in a concrete warehouse on

the Sujo Creek.

6 days later, 35 of those 420 were dead.

That was the path of the Battle of

Shanghai.

From 80,000 [music] to 420

to 35

in 10 weeks.

The retreat from Shanghai bled into the

retreat from Nanjing. By the time the

German trained divisions reached the new

Chinese capital at Wuhan, the 87th, the

88th, and the training division of the

Central Military Academy, the three best

units in Chang's army at the start of

the year, had fewer than 2,500 men

between them.

Estimates of total Chinese casualties at

Shanghai begin at 187,000.

They run as [music] high as 270,000.

The Japanese themselves lost between

40,000 and 90,000 men, depending on

whose numbers [music] you trust.

The Imperial General Staff had expected

to capture Shanghai in 3 days. Among the

Chinese dead were 10,000 of the 25,000

graduates of the Wampoa Military

Academy, the Junior Officer Corps that

had been the backbone of every German

trained [music] division.

They were not replaceable. The men who

had spent 5 years learning German

tactics [music] from German officers

were gone.

The army Hans Fon and Alexander

Fonfalenhausen had spent 5 years

building was in the space of 3 months

almost completely destroyed.

And in Berlin, a man none of them had

met yet was about to [music] make sure

none of it would ever be rebuilt.

Berlin in 1937 [music]

did not have one foreign policy.

It had two.

The official one ran out of the

Vilamstrasa, the German foreign ministry

under Baron Constantine [music] Fonoat,

a career diplomat from before Hitler.

Noat was pro-China. [music] So was his

deputy Hans Gayorg Fonmakinson.

So were the [music] economic ministries

under Halmar Shakt and the war ministry

under Vienna Fon Blumbberg.

The unofficial [music]

foreign policy ran out of a townhouse in

the Berlin suburb of Dalum. It [music]

was called the Deceella Ribbentrop, the

Ribbonrop Bureau. A private operation

funded by Hitler personally, staffed by

Nazi loyalists, dedicated to one idea.

Germany's future lay with Japan, not

with China. Yoke von Riventrop, former

Champagne salesman, current ambassador

to London, future foreign minister, had

been pulling at the threads of the China

Alliance since [music] 1935.

In 1937, he was preparing to pull

harder.

In June of 1937, [music] 5 weeks before

Marco Polo Bridge, Chiang Kai-shek's

finance [music] minister, HHkung,

arrived in Berlin to ask whether Germany

was about to abandon them. He met with

shocked. He met with Bloomberg's deputy.

He met with Mackinson at the foreign

ministry. The [music] answer in every

meeting was the same. The

anti-commonturn pact was a defensive

arrangement against the Soviet Union. It

was not and would not become an

instrument aimed at China. As long as

Mackinson and Noat ran the foreign

ministry, SinoGerman relations would

continue. Kung left Berlin on the 14th

of June. He returned briefly in August,

one month after the SinoJapanese War had

begun. By then, the asurances were

already worth less than the paper they

had not been written on.

On the 21st of August, 1937,

8 days into the Battle of Shanghai,

China signed a non-aggression pact with

the Soviet Union. Within weeks, Soviet

aid began to flow. Soviet aircraft,

Soviet pilots flying combat missions

over Honu.

$250 million American dollars in credit

and weapons.

Militarily, [music]

China was fighting for its life. It

could no longer be choosy about its

sources of help. Politically in Berlin,

the Soviet aid changed [music] the

framing of the relationship.

Hitler, particularly the Hitler [music]

whose ear ribbon now had, could now look

at China and see [music]

instead of an Asian partner against

Japan, a client of Joseph Stalin.

Defending Chiang Kaishek had become in

the mental geography of national

socialism, defending Bolsheism.

That was a fight Noirat and Shakt and

Blombberg could not win.

The 4th of February 1938 was the day the

China policy died. It died at two

ministries [music] simultaneously.

At the war ministry, Vera von Bloomberg,

the field marshal who had signed off on

the Hapro agreement, who had personally

backed the German military mission to

China, was forced out [music] over a

manufactured scandal involving his

second wife. His associate Vera von Frri

the army's [music] commander-in-chief

was forced out the same week on a

fabricated charge. Hitler took direct

command of [music] the armed forces.

At the foreign ministry on the same day,

Constantine vonat [music] was dismissed.

His replacement was Yohim von Ribentrop.

In a single morning, the two ministries

that had defended the China relationship

[music]

for 5 years were beheaded.

The men who [music] took their places

agreed on one thing. Germany's future

was with Tokyo.

16 days later, on the 20th of [music]

February, Adolf Hitler addressed the

Reichto.

Most of the speech was about Austria.

The Anelus was 3 weeks away, but buried

in it was a sentence the Chinese

government had been dreading [music]

since November of 1936.

Germany formally recognized the Empire

of Manuko.

The Japanese controlled puppet state on

what had been Chinese sovereign

territory was now in the eyes of the

Reich a legitimate nation.

In the same speech, on the same subject,

[music] Hitler said this. Even the

greatest victory gained by Japan would

be infinitely less [music] dangerous for

civilization and world peace than any

success achieved by bolsheism.

The Chinese ambassador in Berlin wired

Nanjing. The German military mission in

his estimation had less than 90 days. He

was almost exactly right.

In April of 1938, Yakim Fon Ribbentrop

ended all German armed shipments to

China. He sent telegrams to every German

officer attached to the Chinese army.

The wording was direct. They were to

return to Germany immediately. Their

contracts with the Chinese government

were terminated.

There was a sentence at the end that did

not appear in the formal order. It was

communicated separately, sometimes in

person by German diplomats, [music]

sometimes in a quiet conversation in a

hotel room in Hong Kong. If the officers

refused, their families in Germany would

be sent to concentration camps.

This was the ground [music] these men

had thought they had fled.

Alexander Fonfalenhausen, four years

[music] deep in his escape from the

Reich that had murdered his brother, was

now told that the decision was no longer

his.

The mission had stopped being a

contract.

It had become a hostage exchange.

The advisers began going home.

Falenhausen was the last to leave. In

the first week of July 1938, he had

dinner with Chang Kaishek and [music]

Madame Chang at the family home. The

conversation was by all accounts calm.

Chang did not blame him. Before he

boarded the train out of China,

Falenhausen made Chang one promise.

He had spent four [music] years

designing China's war plan against

Japan. Attrition. Retreat into the

interior. Hold the Yellow River line.

bleed the Japanese economy over years.

That strategy was now in his head in

considerable detail.

He promised Chang Kaishek that he would

never under any circumstance share it

with the Japanese.

He kept the promise for the rest of his

life.

Chiang Kai-shek, for his part,

considered Falconhausen a friend until

the day Chang himself died. In 1953, on

Falenhausen's 75th birthday, [music] a

personal check arrived from Taipei for

12,000 American dollars.

By then, Alexander vonfalenhausen had

survived a Belgian war crimes trial

[music] and Nazi concentration camps,

but that is another episode.

What Hitler had bought in his vault foss

of February 1938 was a partnership with

Imperial Japan.

What he had given up in the same breath

was the only continental ally he had in

Asia, the strongest source of tungsten

for his rearmament and a Chinese army

that was already pinning down hundreds

of thousands of Japanese [music]

soldiers.

It was by any measure a strategic

miscalculation.

But how badly [music] miscalculated was

it exactly?

What did Germany actually get?

Japan refused to allow any new German

businesses into the parts of China it

occupied. Existing German firms, the

ones that had built the relationship

under Hapro, were squeezed out, their

factories nationalized, their assets

transferred to Japanese conglomerates.

The tungsten pipeline that had supplied

German rearmament collapsed almost

overnight.

Berlin began importing tungsten from

Spain and Portugal at higher prices on

shipping routes the Royal Navy could

blockade. Hitler had ended one Asian raw

materials relationship and got nothing

comparable in return.

But the larger problem was geopolitical.

Hitler's bet was that Japan would press

north against the Soviet [music] Union,

tying down Stalin's far eastern

divisions when Germany invaded the USSR.

In 1939, Japan made the attempt at a

place called Kkin Gaul. The Imperial

Japanese Army met the [music] Soviet Far

East under a general named Gueorgi

Zhukov and was destroyed. Tokyo

abandoned the northern strategy. [music]

By 1941, Japan was turning south toward

British Malaya.

Dutch oil, American Pacific bases.

The whole point of Hitler's pivot

[music]

evaporated.

By that same year, the Imperial Japanese

Army was tying down somewhere between

600,000

and a million men in [music] China,

pinning them in the same theater Hitler

had helped to create [music]

before he gave the Chinese soldiers up

to make Japan happy.

Imagine instead that Hitler had let

Falenhousen [music]

finish the work. In a Germany still

arming China in 1941, [music]

the Reich would have had a working

tungsten pipeline, an industrial partner

in the Chinese interior, and a Chinese

army still [music] pinning down Japan's

continental forces, exactly as it had

pinned them in 1937.

Tokyo's already deep caution about war

with the United States would [music]

have been deeper. The Pacific War

Franklin Roosevelt feared in late 1941

might have looked very different. It

might never have come at the same time

as Operation Barbar Roa. Hitler did not

lose the Second World War because he

picked the wrong Asian partner. He lost

it for many reasons. But the partner he

picked [music] was on balance almost

useless to him. and the one he abandoned

would four years later be tying down a

quarter of the Imperial Japanese Army.

This was not [music] a tactical error.

It was a strategic one.

Did the German aid help China? The army

Falenhausen built [music] was destroyed

at Shanghai. The eight elite divisions,

the Woa Officer Corps, [music] the

Stormtroop tactics, all of it ground to

powder in 3 months on the Yanked [music]

Sea.

But the doctrine survived.

The men who had learned German tactics

in 1936

commanded Chinese armies through 1945.

The industrial base built under HAPRO,

steel works in Hube, machine tool plants

in Hunan, chemical factories in Sichuan

became the spine of China's wartime

production deep in the interior beyond

the reach of Japanese bombers.

Falenhausen's strategy of attrition,

hold the Yellow River, retreat into the

interior, bleed Japan slowly, became

official Chinese national strategy

[music] after 1938.

He lost his army. He left behind [music]

a doctrine that won the war.

Hitler thought he was trading a paper

partner for a useful one. He was

actually trading a useful partner for a

paper one. And the war he would lose

four years later began in part in a

Reichdog speech in February of 1938.

We know how the Second World War turned

out. Germany and Japan and Italy on one

side, the United [music] States,

Britain, the Soviet Union, France and

China on the other. The sides are clean.

[music] The story is settled.

But that clarity is a trick of

hindsight. [music] It only became true

around 1941.

For the entire decade before that,

everything we have just [music] walked

through was the rule, not the exception.

Germany armed China against Japan. The

Soviet Union backed Chinese [music]

communists and Chinese nationalists by

turn. Britain and France sold weapons to

anyone with hard currency. Italy [music]

sent military advisers to the same

Chinese army the Germans were training.

Even the United States, officially

neutral, had retired American pilots

flying for Chiang Kaishek.

There was no axis. There were no allies.

There were only governments running

every direction at once.

For us looking at this [music] from the

other side of the 20th century, that

decade is dry history.

But it is worth remembering what it

[music] actually felt like to live

through. A world where the partnerships

of one year became the enemies of the

next. A world where every government's

first instinct was to demand something

from another instead of build something

with one. A world that was by the time

it ended on fire.

That is how the Second World War [music]

began. It is more or less how the First

World War began.

I'll keep telling these stories.

the familiar [music] shape of the Second

World War. The campaigns, the

commanders, the weapons, but also the

part most histories [music] skip over.

The decade before, the years when the

road to that war was [music] still being

paved, one trade agreement and one

broken promise at a time. The years we

just walked through together.

Because if there is one thing worth

taking away from a story like this, it

is that the war that ends with clean

sides [music]

almost never began that way. Someone has

to look at how it actually started.

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