Japanese Private Kikujiro Shimura needed to pee and started World War II.
One of the books I'm reading is written by the historian Richard B. Frank, one of the most interesting historians of the Second World War in the Pacific, and it's called Tower of Skulls: A history of the Pacific Asia war 1937-1942. It is apparently the first of what is expected to be a trilogy.
Frank points out that what we call "The Second World War" in the West did not begin with the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in December of 1941, an attack designed to protect the flank of the Japanese Navy has Japan strove to capture the oil fields of Java and Borneo after the US embargo on oil shipments because of the Japanese War on China. (In 1941, the US was the world's leading oil exporter.)
(No, the Iraq Wars were not the first oil wars; they were just two in a series of such wars, extending into the present day.)
Nor, as Frank notes, did "The Second World War" begin with the German attack on Poland in 1939.
The war began in 1937 in China, when Japan decided to take over all of China, after having set up a puppet state in Manchuria which they called "Manchukuo."
How did it begin? It began what is called the "Marco Polo Bridge incident," which took place in 1937. The outbreak of shooting between the Chinese and Japanese soldier began because Private Kikujiro Shimura failed to appear at a roll call. The Japanese commander, Major Kiyonao Ikki, ordered firing on the Chinese, with the approval of his commander, Colonel Renya Mutaguchi, under the assumption they had either killed or kidnapped Private Shiumura, and this fighting was whipped up by the Japanese propaganda to justify a full scale invasion of China, starting a bitter and deadly Japanese-Chinese war (in which more Japanese soldiers were killed than in the war against the US, along with tens of millions of Chinese civilians and soldiers) that lasted until 1945.
In fact, Private Shimura was not at roll call because he had to take a pee, not because of any Chinese nefarious action against the Japanese military unit stationed in China - other foreign soldiers from other countries also occupied various parts of balkanized China. (Chaing Kai-Shek, often described as the leader of China in history books was merely a prominent war lord in the country, more successful than most at the time, having driven Mao Zedong across China on what became known is "The Long March." )
Private Shimura showed up after taking his pee, but that didn't stop the fighting. He was killed in 1943 in the Japanese Burma campaign. Major Ikki was killed in making an unwise and famous suicidal charge against the Americans at Guadalcanal relatively early in that seesaw battle. Colonel Mutaguchi was promoted to General and went on to lead the worst defeat of the Japanese army up to that time, during an ill-fated attempt to invade then British India in 1943. He was present at the earlier surrender of the British at Singapore in 1942. He survived the war but was captured and tried for war crimes, for which he served three years in prison.
The war that began at the "Marco Polo Bridge" became the worst war in the history of the world, mostly driven by oil politics, but it also became the only nuclear war ever observed.
To this day we carry on about the possibility of nuclear war and still couldn't care less how many people die in oil wars, so called "World War II" being the worst oil war in history.
The "Marco Polo Bridge" had nothing to do with Marco Polo other than the fact that in his writings on his travels to China, he marveled at its construction. It was actually known in China as the Lugou Bridge and was built in 1189, almost a century before the foreign European barbarian Polo visited China.
Interesting bit. I enjoy Richard B. Frank's books enormously, as they always offer tidbits like these. He has written, and I have read, his interesting, well researched and comprehensive account of Guadalcanal.
= new reply since forum marked as read
