Hungry for Chinese territory and witnessing the weakness and disorganization of Chinese forces, but under the pretense of protecting Japanese citizens and investments, the Japanese Imperial Army ordered a full-scale invasion of Manchuria. In response, the privately operated Japanese Guandong (Kwangtung) army began shelling the Shenyang garrison the next day, and the garrison fell before nightfall.

Evidence, though, suggests that the initial explosion was neither an act of Chinese anti-Japanese sentiment nor an accident but an elaborate ruse planned by the Japanese to provide a basis for invasion. The railway company condemned the bombing as the work of anti-Japanese Chinese dissidents. On September 18, 1931, a small explosion tore up railroad tracks controlled by the Japanese-owned South Manchuria Railway near the city of Shenyang (Mukden) in the Chinese province of Manchuria.

For the Empire of Japan, the war had begun a decade before Pearl Harbor. But the war raised as many questions as it would settle and unleashed new social forces at home and abroad that confronted generations of Americans to come.Īlthough the United States joined the war in 1941, two years after Europe exploded into conflict in 1939, the path to the Japanese bombing of Pearl Harbor, the surprise attack that threw the United States headlong into war, began much earlier. Armed with the world’s greatest economy, it looked forward to the fruits of a prosperous consumers’ economy. And when it ended, the United States found itself alone as the world’s greatest superpower. It also unleashed the most fearsome technology ever used in war. The war saw industrialized genocide and nearly threatened the eradication of an entire people. Perhaps eighty million individuals lost their lives during World War II. A global economic crisis gave way to a global war that became the deadliest and most destructive in human history.

Legion ammunition for clear the skies