debor044

The Second Sino-Japanese Conflict of 1931-1945 saw thousands of different regiments, divisions, units, and armies, nationalities fighting throughout what is today Mainland China, Myanmar (Burma), Mongolia, and Korea. Torn apart by revolution and civil war from 1911-1930, China faced a great challenge to its national sovereignty when the mighty Japanese military decided to press its economic and political claims in Manchuria and Northern China beginning in 1930-1931. Japanese Army artillery in Manchuria, 1931 One of the most unique Imperial Japanese Army (IJA) units to fight in the earliest portion of the great Sino-Japanese conflict of 1931-1945 was the Skull Regiment, known alternatively as the Skull Squadron and as the “Manchurian Stormtroopers” for their unique regimental iconography and symbols. The Japanese Skull Regiment was seemingly inspired by the German Totenkopf, or Death’s Head regiments/brigades of the 18th-20th centuries.  Formed originally during the reign of King Fr...

In China’s long history the massive size of its empire both past and present creates many geographical, cultural, and chronological problems when dealing with the study of Chinese warfare in the 19th and early 20th centuries. This issue is prevalent in our Western understanding of China after the Revolution of 1911 which succeeded in the overthrow of the the Qing Empire. China ’s first attempt at a more republican form of government was come to be a fragile coalition of Warlords who in 1912 signed a series of treaties and alliances to form the Beiyang government in what is today  Beijing, China . The Beiyang Star, a political and military symbol of the  5 major regions (Warlord cliques) of China under Beiyang Rule Two of the smaller warlord cliques in the earliest era, Kuomintang (Nationalist dominated, but nominally a Marxist-Leninist party as well) and the independent Chinese Communist Party, later struggled for control over all of China after 1928 and beyond, only interrupt...