After six years of Japanese control of Manchuria, and the establishment of control piecemeal across northern China, a skirmish at the Marco Polo bridge near Beijing presented Chiang with a fateful decision, to wage war now against Japan to prevent China further weakening or to ignore the crisis. Chiang knew that China would be forced to fight alone, as there would be no help forthcoming from embattled European democracies or the USA. Nationalist Chinese troops had developed under the tutelage of German military advisors, but the Chinese officer corps was still too small to face the onslaught to come.

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