MOSCOW, September 13. /TASS/. The Japanese military had realized by 1939 that it had grossly underestimated the scale of resistance it would encounter when it made a decision to start a war on the territory of China, as follows from testimonies by Friedrich Schildknecht, an officer of the Foreign Armies of the East section of the Supreme Command of Germany’s ground forces, who was taken prisoner near Stalingrad. Schildknecht had participated in a trip of a group of Wehrmacht officers to Tokyo in May 1939, whose task was to probe into Japan's readiness to go to war with the Soviet Union. His testimonies were made public by Russia’s federal Security Service (FSB) on the occasion of the 85th anniversary of the end of hostilities on the Khalkhin-Gol River.
According to the German officer, on one day after their arrival in Tokyo in late May 1939, Germany’s deputy military attache in Japan, Lieutenant-Colonel Erwin Scholl (the German military attache was at the Chinese theater of operations at that moment) invited them to dinner at Imperial Hotel.
"During the dinner the conversation touched upon the Japanese-Chinese war. Lieutenant-Colonel Scholl remarked that Japan would have strongly wished to pull out of this Chinese adventure, had it not been a matter of prestige. The Japanese had imagined that a war with China would be far easier and had certainly underestimated the strength of Chinese resistance," Schildknecht testified.
The Japan-China War, which the PRC calls the War of Resistance against Japanese Aggression, lasted from 1937 to 1945.