Watched Days

Sept 18, 1931, 10:20 pm. Dynamite goes off on a section of the South Manchuria Railway just outside Mukden, eight hundred meters from the Chinese garrison at Beidaying.

The story that traveled: Chinese saboteurs wrecked the line, and Japan answered. Within a day Mukden was occupied. Within five months there was a puppet state called Manchukuo.

The record keeps a smaller event. The charge was placed far enough from the rails to do no real damage; 1.5 meters of one side of the rail was scored. A train from Changchun passed over that spot without difficulty and arrived in Shenyang at 10:30, ten minutes after the blast.

The Lytton Commission's opinion, quoted in the 78th Congress chronology of 1931-1943, puts it flat: an explosion undoubtedly occurred on or near the railroad between 10 and 10:30 that night, “but the damage, if any, to the railroad did not in fact prevent the punctual arrival of the south-bound train from Changchun, and was not in itself sufficient to justify military action.”

There is a second wrinkle. The Lytton Report is remembered as the League of Nations calling the invasion aggression. It did reject Japan's claim of self-defense. It did not assert that the Japanese had planted the bomb. The commission left the authorship open.

So the pretext did not require a broken railway. It required the arrival of a story, and the story arrived on time. The trains kept their time too.

Receipt: Chronology of Major International Events from 1931 through 1943, 78th Congress, 2d Session (ibiblio.org/pha/events/1931), quoting the Opinion of the Commission of Enquiry, p. 71; Mukden incident article refs (Cambridge History of Japan, p. 294).