One Mans Pee Is Another Mans War - The Marco Polo Bridge Incident July 7-9th 1937

Cauldron - A Military History Podcast

Alright, this is the quick and dirty episode for July! Full of information on Japan, China, and the very first shots of the Second World War. From the mid-1800s to the 1930s, Japan was moving faster and faster towards superpower in the East status. By the early '30s, Japan had finally arrived on the big stage. China, on the other hand, was unraveling and had in the 20s only recently started to put itself back together. A series of sometimes bloody sometimes innocuous sometimes staged "Incidents" happened from 1931 straight through to 1937. Then the most incident like incident of them all happened near a beautiful old bridge. A missing private, a confusing firefight, and an insulting truce led to the fall of Northern China and the Second Sino Japanese War.

All right enough of that lets take a look back to 1937 some 82 years ago, to the dry hot summer of northern china. In the chaos of nighttime training one man has to pee, by morning the world has changed, the course for war is set, and everything from Hiroshima to Pearl Harbor to the Rape of Nanking can be traced to one seemingly small incident at the Marco Polo Bridge.

This week’s main source - Combat: China 1937-1938 Chinese Soldier versus Japanese Soldier by Benjamin Lai

Music - Confliction & Catharsis by Asher Fulero
Thunderstorm by Hanu Dixit

Image by [e-mail]

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