The Sirens of Tragic Remembrance
Jiayuguan, Gansu province, China, September 18th, 2013
Salaroche


Barely a couple of minutes after walking into my office at around 09:15 this morning, there started wailing some very loud sirens not too far away from my school. I was more than a bit curious about it, but continued to log into my computer. By the time I had finished there started a second wave of siren-howling piercing the air outside the school.

This time I walked the few meters separating my desk from the windows that give to the central court, sort of expecting to see some commotion out there, but there was none. The court was clearly devoid of anyone. Then, paying close attention to the environment inside the school, I noticed there was nothing unusual going on in there either, so I just assumed the whole event must be something rather ordinary for everyone else and just kept going with my morning as usual.

But the sirens sounded a few more times during the day. At one point, as I was teaching a class, I must have looked a bit puzzled to my students because a couple of them told me not to worry about it; they said the sirens were only sounding in remembrance of the Japanese attacks.

When I came back home a few hours later carrying my dinner with me I found out over the Internet that there were actually no Japanese air raids flown over Jiayuguan during the second Sino-Japanese war. That war started at the Marco Polo Bridge near Beijing in July of 1937 and ended in September of 1945 after the defeat of Japan by American forces. I did find out, however, that there were a few air raids flown over Lanzhou, the capital city of Gansu Province, most of them between 1938 and 1941.

To put things in perspective, let's recall that the Soviets had been the main suppliers of war planes to China since the beginning of the war, and that by the end of 1938 the US and other countries were also providing China with fighter planes. The Soviets were also sending volunteer pilots to fight alongside the Chinese and together they were able to intercept more than a few Japanese bomber squadrons.

Looking at it from this angle, the Sino-Japanese war was more of a multi-national war than many of us may have thus far imagined, even more so when we learn that Germany was at that point very influential in modernizing China industrially and militarily and remained so up until 1941.

With all that in mind, I called a couple of Chinese colleagues looking for more info about the sirens, but none of them knew with much detail why they were wailing so loud and repeatedly. Under those circumstances, I just assumed the sirens in Jiayuguan were sounding in remembrance of the air raids flown over Lanzhou during any given month of September during the Sino-Japanese war.

In reviewing the whole incident I was reminded of some historians who propose that WWII didn’t actually start when Hitler invaded Poland in September of 1939, but right after the Marco Polo Incident in July of 1937, when the Japanese declared total war on China. And when we contemplate the situation unfolding in Lanzhou around 1938 we can see that there may actually be a tinge of truth to that argument, if only a tinge of it.

In any case, in playing the role of historians, my students allowed me to witness in them that certain level or bitterness that many Chinese people still hold against Japan. My students were obviously not around when Imperial Japan was roaming loose across this country, raping the city of Nanjing and committing other similar war crimes, but their anti-Japan resentment already seems to be well ingrained in their psyche.

The wailing of those sirens, therefore, does indeed awaken some tragic memories in many Chinese minds and, by exposure, in that of some of us as well.

Salaroche