Last edition:
Showing posts with label Kuomintang. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Kuomintang. Show all posts
Friday, June 5, 2026
Tuesday, May 19, 2026
Wednesday, May 19, 1926. Bad coinage idea.
The first and only US coin, so far, to feature a sitting President, the United States Sesquicentennial Half Dollar was issued.
Hopefully this break in tradition will never be repeated.
Zhang Renjie became the first Chairman of the Kuomintang. His influence would later decline and he immigrated to the United States in 1937.
The French Air Force bombed Damascus.
Last edition:
Saturday, May 15, 1926.
Friday, March 20, 2026
Saturday, March 20, 1926. Coup in China.
General Chiang Kai-shek carried out a purge of Communists from the Republic of China's military and the Kuomintang party, In doing it, Chiang declared martial law in the Republic's capital at Guangzhou essentially effecting a coup.
While a major event, it's surprisingly understudied and the details are murky. At the time, Chiang maintained he was acting first in the face of an impending Communist coup. While its not at all clear that was the case, and many people assert it was a pretext, even the Communist have never had all that much to say about this event.
It was a Saturday.
The Wyoming Game and Fish Department released 27 paris of Hungarian Partridges
Last edition:
Tuesday, March 16, 1926. Sgt. Stubby crosses the Rainbow Bridge.
Wednesday, August 20, 2025
Thursday, August 20, 1925. Thrills, frills and stills.
From Reddit's 100 Years Ago Sub.
The Republic of China's finance minister, Liao Zhongkai, was assassinated as he stepped out of his limousine for a meeting of the Kuomintang's Executive Committee. The Kuomintang had barred British and Japanese ships from entering or leaving Canton's harbor the day prior.
At the time, the Kuomintang was heavily left wing, with right wing elements, and veered towards a sort of Communism. It was backed by the USSR. It was also not fully in control of the country, and in fact, it never would be.
It's choice of allies and backers over the years would evolve enormously. After the right wing deposed the Communists, and the Chinese Civil War started, it continued to receive support, oddly, from the USSR, but also did from Germany, that support starting during the Weimar period and lasting right up until the Sino Japanese War, at which time the Germans withdrew it due to Japanese protests with some reluctance. It'd continue to be a friend of the Soviet Union's all the way through World War Two, but during the war itself, the United States became its major supporter.
Last edition:
Sunday, August 16, 1925. Cuban Communists, Big Beer Haul, Dainty Ankles.
Tuesday, July 1, 2025
Wednesday, July 1, 1925. The Kuomintang proclaimed a new national government for the Republic of China.
The Kuomintang proclaimed a new national government for the Republic of China.
Ford Australia produced its first Model T.
Last edition:
Sunday, June 28, 1925. Executing the Kurdish rebels.
Saturday, June 21, 2025
Sunday, June 21, 1925. Vietnamese Revolutionary Youth League
Nguyen Ai Quoc (Ho Chi Minh) founded the Vietnamese Revolutionary Youth League (Việt Nam Thanh niên Cách mệnh Đồng chí Hội; chữ Hán: 越南青年革命同志會) in Guangzhou, China. It was Vietnam's first Communist organization and had the support of the Chinese Communist Party and the Kuomintang.
It'd dissolve due to internal splits in 1929.
Last edition:
Saturday, June 20, 1925. La battaglia del grano.
Tuesday, March 18, 2025
Wednesday, March 18, 1925. The Tri State Tornado.
The deadliest tornado in U.S. History, the Tri State Tornado, swept across the states of Missouri, Illinois and Indiana killing 751 people.
The Yunnan–Guangxi War began in China's Yunnan province over succession of leadership in the Kuomintang.
Last edition:
Saturday, March 14, 1925. Spring.
Sunday, November 10, 2024
Monday, November 10, 1924. Henry Cabot Lodge passes.
He was a giant of American politics.
The Tientsin Conference opened in China between warlords Zhang Zuolin, Feng Yuxiang, and Lu Yongxiang. Former president Sun Yat-sen, the ongoing head of the Kuomintang and the government sitting in Canton, organized the meeting to discuss the ongoing civil war.
Ranch property belonging to Mexican president elect Plutarco Elías Calles was expropriated by the state in accordance with Mexican agrarian laws.
Chicago mobster Dean O'Banion, leader of Chicago's North Side Gang, was gunned down in his florist shop, making the cover of The Casper Herald. His murder was nearly inevitable as he'd grown crosswise with one of the Italian mob families in Chicago.
Last edition:
Saturday, November 8, 1924. Declaration from Honolulu.
Wednesday, February 2, 2022
Monday, February 2, 1942. Things Chinese
Franklin Roosevelt asked Congress to loan $500,000,000 to Nationalist China.
US poster for China relief. This is obviously an idealized poster, but its interesting in that the family is shown in typical Chinese dress for the time, with the Nationalist soldier pretty accurately shown with a export pattern contract M98 Mauser and attired in German inspired clothing, including the feldmutze adopted by the Nationalist Chinese Army.
This doesn't seem surprising now, but in retrospect, Nationalist China's road to being an ally of the United States was a circuitous one. The Nationalist had been a Soviet client since 1921 and remained one even after the Communist were removed from the Kuomintang, the event that brought about the Chinese Civil War. Indeed, while the Soviets also supported the Chinese Communist Party, it operated to force the CCP to make accommodations to the Kuomintang even while the two were fighting against each other. Moscow's hand was so heavy that it can be argued that Stalin essentially prevented a Communist takeover of China before 1949 through its actions. A pre-war effort by the Japanese to secure a treaty with the USSR that went beyond being a mere non-aggression pact had included, as part of its conditions, that the Soviets quit supplying the Nationalist, which the Soviets refused.
Soviet volunteer aviators with the Nationalist Chinese. Soviet aircrews fought with the Nationalist until the German invasion of the USSR, making their volunteer effort earlier than the American one.
Indeed, the Soviets not only supplied aid and material to the Chinese Nationalist, they supplied a group of volunteer aviators. The US AVG came about only after the Soviet effort concluded. The Soviets, therefore, aided the Nationalist in real terms longer, and in some ways, more concretely, than the US did, right up until the late 1930s when the US became very interested in Japanese aggression in China.
Soviet I-16 fighter in Nationalist Chinese use. This aircraft was a popular fighter of the 1930s and saw service early in World War Two, by which time it was obsolete.
At the same time, Nationalist China received significant support from Nazi Germany as well.
Poster symbolizing German and Nationalist Chinese military cooperation, and also demonstrating the very close appearance of their respective uniforms. The German pattern helmets used by the Chinese were of the late M35 pattern, making them a more modern pattern, for example, than that usually shown worn by the Finns, who retained the old M16s until later patterns were supplied to them during World War Two.
German aid to the Chinese Nationalist military dated back to Weimar Germany, and China had been one of the outlet nations which allowed the Weimar government to basically bypass restrictions on the size of the German officer corps. This continued on into the 1930s with it going so far as to see one of Chiang Kai Shek's children, an adopted son, receive German military training, while another saw an education in the USSR, showing the nature of the relationship between the two countries and the Nationalist.
Chiang Wei-kuo.
The Germans pulled towards the Japanese in the late 1930s, although that relationship was not anywhere near as seamless or trusting as sometimes supposed, and was more than a little cynical on the German side (it was much less cynical on the Japanese side). As this occurred the Germans began to slowly abandon the Chinese, although not before the Chinese Nationalist Army was essentially equipped in a fashion that distantly mirrored the German Army's to a significant extent. The Nationalist Chinese fought the Second World War principally armed with German infantry weapons, and they even acquired a handful of tanks from the Germans before Japanese protests caused the supply of such things to cease.
Chinese soldier guarding American P-40s. He's armed with a contract German M98 Mauser and his uniform, sans footgear, is basically German in pattern.
The United States, in contrast, had never actually been a major military supplier to anyone prior to World War Two and only stepped into that role with China very late, indeed basically at the same time it started to supply the British in the Second World War.
It should be noted that in spite of all of this aid, from all of these various sources, and in spite of the fact that the Nationalist Chinese fought much better than they have been credited as doing, massive corruption existed within the Nationalist Chinese ranks which enormously depleted their effectiveness. Vast amounts of aid were wasted or subject to corrupt diversion and the plight of the Chinese enlisted man a bad one, which accounted for a massive desertion rate.
The US can be regarded as having been naive throughout this period in regard to China in every fashion. The Nationalist Chinese fought much harder than they're credited with against the Japanese, as noted, but the Nationalist were not in a position to expel them and their own internal corruption hindered their effectiveness. Chiang clashed with his American advisor's views, although he was always extremely polite to them even though he knew that some, such as Gen. Stilwell, held him in contempt. The long history of his political movement demonstrates that it was one of complicated political beliefs which in fact included some sympathy to the very hard left, but the government was not a democratic one during Chiang's control of it, something he attributed to wartime and civil war conditions.
Wartime pro British Nationalist card.
During the war the US military mission to China would become significant, but wartime conditions also meant that the OSS mission was more than a little sympathetic to the Chinese Communists and, in fact, included members who were Communist themselves. The rapid collapse of the Chinese Nationalist, who had held out throughout the 1930s, raised questions that have still never really been fully answered about how that came about, but it is clear that the Truman administration simply had no real sympathy for the Nationalist and had grown tired of them. Here too, the US failed to appreciate China and where things were heading, once the Nationalist had lost the favor of their final patron, the United States. Chiang, for his part, partially attributed his 1949 defeat to the corruption that has always existed in his movement, and he diligently worked to eliminate it once he was exiled to Taiwan.
Oddly, Chiang Kai Shek has undergone a bit of a rehabilitation in Communist China in recent years, with some scholarly articles reassessing his leadership favorably. It's hard to know what to make of this.
On this same day, and on the same topic, more or less, Joseph Stilwell was designated Chief of Staff to Supreme Commander, China Theatre, which meant he was Chief of Staff to Chiang.
Stilwell didn't get along with Chiang and was outraged by Chinese corruption and military inefficiency, both of which were very real as noted. He became more vociferous about his views as the war went on, and was ultimately partially recalled because of this. He referred to Chiang as peanut, and his views might be best illustrated, in part, by this poem he authored.
Also on this day, as Sarah Sundin's blog reports:
February 2, 1942: : US 808th Engineer Aviation Battalion arrives in Melbourne to build airfields near Darwin, Australia. Allied ships begin withdrawal from Singapore to East Indies.
At this time, there was a real fear that the Japanese would land on Australia.
On the Eastern Front, the Germans were forced to supply the troops surrounded at Kholm by air.
Life Magazine featured a P-47 on its cover, a stunning thing to realize in that in 1942 the common American fighter was the over matched P-40. The P-47 would go on to be one of the great convoy escort aircraft of the war and obtain a reputation as a terrific ground support aircraft. The plane had made its first flight in 1941 and had not yet gone into service, but the fact that it was at this stage meant that the US had already leaped an entire aircraft generation ahead of any other combatant in the war.
Tuesday, July 8, 2014
Wednesday, July 8, 1914. Rebels and Emperors.
Mexican rebels under Álvaro Obregón defeated a Federal force numbering 6,000 sent out from Guadalajara to arrest his advance.
Exiled Chinese revolutionary figure Sun Yat-sen reorganized the Kuomintang party under the new name Chinese Revolutionary Party after Yuan Shikai, self-proclaimed emperor of China, outlawed the political party.
The Austro Hungarian Council of Ministers gave its recommendations to the Emperor, with the first bieng a surprise attack on Serbia being the preferred option, and the second place one being to place demands on Serbia before mobilization to provide a proper "juridical basis for a declaration of war".
Last edition:
Tuesday, July 7, 1914. Pondering war.
Labels: 1910s, 1914, Austro Hungaria, Germany, Hungary, July Crisis, Personalities, Serbia, World War One
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