ABSTRACT
In his unpublished memoir written after World War II, Kamei Kan-ichiro attributed Japan’s defeat in the Pacific War to the Marco Polo Bridge Incident. According to Kamei, Japan had engaged in battle without recognizing the danger posed by the rise of Chinese nationalism in the 1920s and 1930s. Although the number of casualties (killed and missing in action) were close to ten thousand on each side (if anything, the Soviet casualties were probably larger than the Japanese), it is generally accepted that it was a thumping Soviet victory. The battle was almost certainly a Soviet provocation that used Komatsubara Michitaro, the commander of the Japanese Army’s Twenty-Third division who had been trapped in a Soviet “honey trap” while he was Japan’s military attaché to Moscow in the late 1920s and subsequently blackmailed into serving the Soviets. As was the case in the Kanchazu Incident in 1937, Moscow remained silent on the military clash in Nomonhan.
