Marco Polo Bridge Incident
Name Military Post ( s ) Non-Military Post ( s )
General Song Zheyuan ( 宋哲元 ; Wade-Giles : Sung Che-yuan ) Commander of 29th Route Army Chairman of Hopeh Legislative Committee Head of Peking security forces
General Qin Dechun ( 秦德純 ; Wade-Giles : Chin Teh-chun ) Vice-Commander of 29th Army Mayor of Peking
General Tong Lin'ge ( 佟麟閣 ; Vice-Commander of 29th Army
General Liu Ruming ( 劉汝明 ) Commander of the 143rd Division Chairman of Chahar Province
General Feng Zhian ( 馮治安 ) Commander of the 37th Division Chairman of Hopeh Province
General Zhao Dengyu ( 趙登禹 ; Wade-Giles : Chao Teng-yu ) Commander of the 132nd Division
General Zhang Zizhong ( 張自忠 ; Wade-Giles : Chang Tze-chung ) Commander of the 38th Division Mayor of Tientsin
Colonel Ji Xingwen ( 吉星文 ) Commander of the 219th Regiment under the 110th Brigade of the 37th Division
Order of battle -- National Revolutionary Army ( Kuomintang )
See also : National Revolutionary Army and Kuomintang In comparison to their Japanese counterparts , the 29th Route Army , and generally all of the NRA for that matter , was poorly equipped and under-trained . Most soldiers were armed only with a rifle and a dao ( a single-edged Chinese sword similar to a machete ) . Moreover , the Chinese garrison in the Lugouqiao area was completely outnumbered and outgunned ; it consisted only of about 100 soldiers . [ 1 ]
The Marco Polo Bridge Incident, also known by Lugou Bridge Incident or Double-Seven Incident, was a July 1937 battle between China's National Revolutionary Army and the Imperial Japanese Army. It is widely considered to have been the start of the Second Sino-Japanese War, and by extension, sometimes given as an alternative starting date for World War II (as opposed to the more commonly-cited one of September 1939).