The Battle of Changsha begins

On the night of 14–15 September 1939 the Japanese 106th Division under General Ryōtarō Nakai struck from the Fengxin area in the north of Jiangxi province at the positions of the Chinese 184th Division of the 60th Army. So began the operation that the Japanese called Kan-Shō (from the traditional abbreviated names of the provinces of Jiangxi and Hunan) and the Chinese called the First Battle of Changsha. Its objective was Changsha, the capital of Hunan province and the headquarters of the Chinese 9th War Zone. It was the first great offensive in China after the outbreak of war in Europe, launched two weeks after Germany invaded Poland and a day before the armistice concluded in Moscow that ended the fighting at Khalkhin Gol.

Some chronologies state that on 14 September the Japanese 11th Army “set out from Yueyang, supported by divisions from Jiangxi”. In reality the order was the reverse. On 14 September it was the divisions stationed in Jiangxi that attacked first, with the task of pinning down and drawing off the Chinese reserves in the east. The main thrust, from the Yueyang area on Lake Dongting due south towards Changsha, did not begin until 18 September, and some accounts, Western ones in particular, date the start of the battle from that day (or from 17 September). Chinese and Japanese accounts nevertheless agree in naming 14 September as the day the operation began.

The third year of the war

By the beginning of September 1939 the Sino-Japanese War had been going on for more than two years. It had begun with the Marco Polo Bridge Incident in July 1937, and for the first eighteen months it had looked like an unbroken run of Japanese victories: Beijing, Tianjin and Shanghai fell, and in December 1937 so did the capital, Nanjing, where Japanese soldiers perpetrated the Nanjing Massacre. In May 1938 came the fall of Xuzhou, and that autumn the two most important cities China still held: Canton on 21 October, and on 25 and 26 October the three cities that made up Wuhan, which for most of 1938 had served as the country’s de facto capital. The government of Chiang Kai-shek moved to Chongqing in Sichuan, beyond the reach of the Japanese land armies.

Historians divide the war into periods. The fall of Wuhan in October 1938 closes the first of them, the period of great Japanese offensives and rapid territorial gains. The second, which lasted until December 1941, when Japan attacked the United States and Britain, was a period of relative stalemate. The Japanese held eastern China with almost all its great cities, ports and railways, but lacked the strength to push further into the interior, and needed ever more troops to guard what they had already taken. The Chinese could not win back the lost territory, but had no intention of capitulating. At a conference at Nanyue in November 1938 the Chinese high command adopted a strategy of a war of attrition: the regular armies were to hold the front line and inflict losses on the Japanese, while guerrillas operated in their rear. The country was divided into war zones, each responsible for its own sector.

This second period did not mean quiet. In February 1939 the Japanese landed on Hainan; in March they took Nanchang, the capital of Jiangxi, making large-scale use of poison gas; and in May they fought the Battle of Suixian–Zaoyang in northern Hubei. From May onwards the Japanese air force carried out the terror bombing of Chongqing, in which thousands of civilians died. In December 1938 Wang Jingwei, one of the leading politicians of the Kuomintang, had fled from Chongqing to Hanoi, and by the summer of 1939 he was negotiating with the Japanese over the creation of a Chinese government subordinate to them. At the same time Japan was locked in a sharp dispute with Britain over the blockade of the Tianjin concessions and was waging an undeclared war with the Soviet Union at Khalkhin Gol. For China, which had been fighting alone for two years, the war would remain separate from the European war for more than two years yet, though ever more closely intertwined with it. Only in December 1941 did the Republic of China find itself in the same camp as the Allies, and Japan, bound since 1940 by a pact with Germany and Italy, in the camp of the Axis powers.

The Japanese 11th Army and the Chinese 9th War Zone

After the capture of Wuhan the main Japanese force in central China was the 11th Army, commanded since July 1938 by Lieutenant General Yasuji Okamura. Its headquarters were at Hankou, and its divisions stretched for hundreds of kilometres along the Yangtze and south of it, as far as Nanchang. The Japanese felt hemmed in at Wuhan. To the north, east and south they were surrounded by Chinese war zones, the strongest of which, the 9th War Zone, defended Hunan and north-western Jiangxi. Its troops attacked Japanese outposts several times in 1939, and the 11th Army command believed they had to be smashed before they grew stronger.

The formal commander of the 9th War Zone was General Chen Cheng, one of Chiang Kai-shek’s closest associates, but in practice the zone was run by his deputy, the acting commander General Xue Yue. He was one of the ablest Chinese commanders: a Cantonese, a veteran of the Northern Expedition and of the campaigns against the Communists, who in October 1938, during the Battle of Wuhan, had encircled and destroyed the Japanese 106th Division at Wanjialing in northern Jiangxi. Under his command in Hunan, Jiangxi and southern Hubei stood more than 30 divisions, some 240,000 men according to Chinese accounts, although many units were under strength and poorly armed. Changsha was by then a city already scarred by the war: on the night of 12–13 November 1938, when the Japanese were expected to arrive quickly after the fall of Wuhan, the Chinese authorities in a panic set fire to the city so that it should not fall into enemy hands. The fire destroyed most of Changsha and killed thousands of its inhabitants, and Chiang Kai-shek afterwards had three of the officers responsible shot.

The plan and the forces

On 15 August 1939 the 11th Army staff adopted guidelines for an operation south of the Yangtze. The Japanese documents stressed that the aim was not a lasting occupation of territory but a swift, surprise blow intended to “catch and destroy” the main forces of the 9th War Zone, after which the troops were to return to their starting positions. The offensive was also part of a wider political calculation. After the defeat at Khalkhin Gol and the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, which Tokyo had received as a betrayal by Germany, the army needed a victory. On 4 September the new government of General Nobuyuki Abe announced that Japan would stay out of the war in Europe and concentrate on “settling the China Incident”. In September all the forces in China were placed under a new command, the China Expeditionary Army, with its headquarters in Nanjing, General Toshizō Nishio as commander and Seishirō Itagaki as chief of staff. A heavy blow against the 9th War Zone was meant to weaken Chongqing’s will to resist and ease the way for the creation of Wang Jingwei’s government.

Okamura planned three axes of advance. In the east, in northern Jiangxi, the 101st and 106th Divisions were to move west from the Nanchang and Fengxin area towards the Hunan border. In the centre, in southern Hubei, the 33rd Division was to strike south from the Tongcheng area through the mountains towards Pingjiang. The main thrust, from the Yueyang area along the Wuhan–Canton railway, was to be delivered by General Shirō Inaba’s 6th Division, reinforced by two detachments drawn from the divisions stationed north of the Yangtze: General Akira Nara’s detachment from the 13th Division and General Mikio Uemura’s detachment from the 3rd Division. Uemura’s detachment, with naval support, was to move by boat along the eastern shore of Lake Dongting and come out on the Chinese flank. In all, by most estimates, some 100,000 Japanese troops took part in the operation, with strong artillery, aircraft and a river flotilla. Chinese sources sometimes give higher figures.

The Chinese command had been expecting an attack since the spring. Chiang Kai-shek and the deputy chief of the general staff, Bai Chongxi, wanted the 9th War Zone to resist on the successive rivers of northern Hunan and, if necessary, even give up Changsha, delivering the decisive blow only south of the city, once the Japanese had exhausted themselves and moved far from their bases. Xue Yue accepted the principle of “falling back before the decisive battle” but believed that Changsha had to be held. He prepared defences on the four rivers that cross the road from Yueyang to Changsha: the Xinqiang, the Miluo, the Laodao and the Liuyang. The population was evacuated, grain stocks were carried off into the mountains, and the roads were dug up and turned into rice paddies, so that Japanese lorries, guns and tanks sank in the mud.

The first days on the Jiangxi front

The 106th Division’s attack of 14 September quickly broke through the positions of the Chinese 60th Army. The Japanese took Huibu and, over the following days, Gao’an, and pushed west and north-west towards Shangfu, Ganfang and Xiushui, intending to cross the mountains to the Hunan border and link up with the troops advancing from Yueyang. The 101st Division supported their movement from the south. The advance soon lost momentum, however. The Chinese troops, among them General Wang Yaowu’s elite 74th Army, trained and armed like the best government divisions, withdrew into the mountains and then struck at the Japanese flanks. On 22 September the Chinese retook Gao’an. The Jiangxi divisions failed to link up with the rest of the 11th Army and at the end of the month began to withdraw eastwards. They had, however, largely fulfilled their task: they had drawn upon themselves the attention and part of the reserves of the 9th War Zone just as the main offensive was getting under way in northern Hunan.

On 18 September the troops of the 6th Division and the Nara and Uemura detachments, some 50,000 men in all, attacked the Chinese outposts north of the Xinqiang river that guarded the road south from Yueyang. On 21 and 22 September the 33rd Division also went over to the attack in southern Hubei. The offensive against Changsha was now unfolding along its whole breadth.

Significance

The Japanese offensive of September 1939 was the first of four attempts to take Changsha. It ended in early October with the Japanese troops withdrawing to their starting positions, a withdrawal that the Chinese government proclaimed a great victory and the Japanese command a return planned from the outset. In reality neither side achieved all it wanted: the Japanese did not destroy the 9th War Zone, and the Chinese did not annihilate the retreating divisions. But the city whose capture the entire foreign press had expected in October remained in Chinese hands, and Xue Yue emerged from the battle as one of the heroes of Chinese resistance.

In a wider perspective the battle showed that in the second period of the war Japan could no longer settle the fighting in China with a single blow. Its troops could penetrate deep into Chinese territory, but could not remain there without the risk of being cut off. Twice more, in 1941 and at the turn of 1941 and 1942, the Japanese advanced on Changsha, and each time they turned back. The city fell only in June 1944, during the great Ichi-gō offensive. Before that happened, the war in China had merged with the world war: in December 1941 the Republic of China declared war on Japan, Germany and Italy, and hundreds of thousands of Japanese soldiers tied down on fronts such as Hunan could not be used in the Pacific.