The Battle of Huangqiao

On the afternoon of 4 October 1940, a few kilometres north of the small town of Huangqiao in central Jiangsu province, north of the Yangtze, units of the communist New Fourth Army sprang an ambush and surrounded the government Independent 6th Brigade as it marched on the town. After three hours of fighting the brigade had ceased to exist, and its commander, General Weng Da, took his own life. So began the Battle of Huangqiao, the largest clash so far between the two formal allies of the Second United Front: Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang and the Chinese Communist Party. Over the next two days the communists, led by Chen Yi and Su Yu, smashed the main forces of the governor of Jiangsu province, General Han Deqin. The commander of his 89th Army, General Li Shouwei, drowned during the retreat.

Popular chronologies place this event under 1 October and state that “Chinese nationalists and communists fight each other in southern China” and that “the Japanese are defeated at Changsha”. Neither part of this is accurate. The fighting took place not in southern China but in Jiangsu, on the plain between the Yangtze and the old bed of the Yellow River, in a region the Chinese call Subei (northern Jiangsu) or Suzhong (central Jiangsu). Han Deqin’s troops set out for Huangqiao on 30 September, but because of torrential rain the attack proper began only on 4 October, and that day is regarded as the start of the battle. There was no fighting at all at Changsha in October 1940. The first battle for the city was fought in September and October 1939 and ended in a Chinese victory; the second came in September and October 1941, when on 1 October 1941 the Japanese began to withdraw from the city they had briefly occupied. The popular version probably conflates these events. Southern China did, however, see a different Japanese withdrawal in the autumn of 1940: after their entry into northern Indochina the Japanese, according to the Chinese commander in Guangxi, Zhang Fakui, voluntarily abandoned Nanning, captured in 1939, which the Chinese entered on 30 October, proclaiming a victory.

The United Front in crisis

The Second United Front, concluded in 1937, was never an alliance of equals. The communist armed forces were formally incorporated into the National Revolutionary Army. In the north operated Zhu De’s Eighth Route Army, while in the south the New Fourth Army was formed from the scattered guerrilla units left behind in 1934 in the old bases in Jiangxi and neighbouring provinces. Its commander was Ye Ting, a distinguished commander from the days of the Northern Expedition who had been outside the party for years; his deputy and the real political leader was the communist Xiang Ying. The government assigned both armies their operational zones and paid their wages. The New Fourth Army was given a narrow strip of southern Anhui and southern Jiangsu, south of the Yangtze, subordinate to General Gu Zhutong’s 3rd War Zone. Money was short: according to Chinese studies, instead of the promised 180,000 yuan a month the army received at first 80,000 and later 135,000.

From the start of the war Mao Zedong had urged the communist armies to avoid major battles with the Japanese and to build bases, administration and forces behind their lines. In areas from which the government army had withdrawn this was not difficult, but communist expansion inevitably encroached on territory the Kuomintang regarded as its own. From 1939 onwards there were ever more frequent clashes, which the communists called “frictions”. At the turn of 1939 and 1940 they fought Yan Xishan’s troops in Shanxi during the Japanese counter-offensive in Shanxi, and in March 1940 the Eighth Route Army routed Zhu Huaibing’s government forces on the borders of Hebei, Henan and Shanxi. It was then that Mao formulated his principle for dealing with the “die-hards”: act “on just grounds, to our advantage and with restraint” – that is, never strike first, but answer every attack and not go too far.

In 1940 the centre of gravity of these disputes shifted to central China. The party leadership concluded that northern China, where the Japanese were stepping up operations against the bases and the government wanted to hem in both communist armies, was not enough. In February 1940 the Central Committee instructed Chen Yi to “expand vigorously in northern Jiangsu”, and on 5 April Mao wrote that without entering central China the communists “cannot survive”. The effort was directed by Liu Shaoqi, secretary of the party’s Central Plains (Zhongyuan) Bureau. The Kuomintang saw the same thing from the other side. In March 1940 the government drew up a plan to drive the communists out of the Huai River basin and cut the New Fourth Army off from the Eighth Route Army, and on 16 July it adopted the so-called Central Proposal, under which both communist armies were to concentrate north of the Yellow River. The communists rejected it.

The communists in northern Jiangsu

In 1940 northern and central Jiangsu was a land of many authorities. The Japanese and the collaborationist Wang Jingwei government held the large cities on the Yangtze and the Grand Canal and the main roads. In the interior, with his seat at Xinghua, ruled the provincial governor Han Deqin, who was also deputy commander of the Shandong–Jiangsu War Zone. He was a professional officer, a graduate of the Baoding academy, who had fought at Xuzhou and Wuhan. He commanded his own 89th Army, with the 33rd and 117th Divisions, the Independent 6th Brigade and a dozen or so security brigades. Alongside him, around Taizhou, stood the troops of Li Mingyang and Li Changjiang, nominally subordinate to the government but hostile to Han, together with Chen Taiyun’s units. Han Deqin was regarded as one of the most implacable enemies of the communists. They accused him of having destroyed, in 1939, several guerrilla units that had cooperated with them.

Chen Yi’s first units crossed to the north bank of the Yangtze as early as 1939. At the end of June 1940 one of them repulsed, at Guocun north-west of Taizhou, an attack by the troops of the two Lis, sent – according to the communists – by Han. In July Chen Yi and Su Yu brought their main forces, about 7,000 men, across the river and occupied Huangqiao, from which a government security brigade withdrew without a fight. Chen Yi adopted a policy summed up in three phrases: fight the enemy, oppose Han, unite with the Lis. The communists tried to win over the two Lis and Chen Taiyun, or at least to neutralise them, and to a large extent they succeeded. On 12 July Mao announced that units of the Eighth Route Army were coming from the north to help, but stipulated that the New Fourth Army “must on no account strike first”.

In September the tension mounted. On 6 September Han Deqin’s troops attacked the communists at Yingxi and lost two regiments of a security brigade. On 13 September the New Fourth Army captured the town of Jiangyan, defended by the brigade of Zhang Shaohua, whom the communists accused of dealings with the Japanese. On 30 September the communists left Jiangyan, which they presented as a gesture of goodwill, but they handed it over not to Han but to Li Mingyang, which divided the New Fourth Army’s opponents even further. That same day Han Deqin marched on Huangqiao.

Forces and plans

According to Chinese communist studies, Han Deqin assembled about 26 regiments, more than 30,000 soldiers. The main blow was to be delivered from the north and east by his own forces, Li Shouwei’s 89th Army and Weng Da’s Independent 6th Brigade, about 15,000 men in all. The troops of the two Lis and Chen Taiyun on the right wing and five security brigades on the left were to attack from the west and south and cover the flanks. The New Fourth Army in northern Jiangsu numbered about 7,000 men, of whom only around 5,000 were front-line soldiers. It was organised in three columns, commanded by Ye Fei, Wang Bicheng and Tao Yong. It had very few heavy weapons.

Chen Yi directed the whole operation from the village of Yanxuzhuang, about 20 kilometres west of Huangqiao, while command on the battlefield was taken by his deputy Su Yu, one of the ablest communist commanders. Help from the north could not arrive in time. On 3 October Mao cabled Zhou Enlai that the principle was: “if Han does not attack Chen, [the troops of] Huang will not attack Han; if Han attacks Chen, Huang will certainly attack Han”. This referred to Huang Kecheng’s column of the Eighth Route Army, which was advancing from the north. Han Deqin, however, had the boats destroyed on the rivers it had to cross, and it reached the vicinity of the battlefield only after the fighting was over. Su Yu therefore decided to hold the town with small forces, keep his main body outside it and destroy the approaching columns one by one. Following the principle of striking the weaker opponent first, he ought to have attacked the units of the two Lis and the security brigades. He judged, however, that since these troops had quietly declared their neutrality, attacking them would be a political mistake, whereas destroying Han’s best unit would paralyse the rest. He therefore chose as his target the well-armed Independent 6th Brigade, which according to communist accounts had Czechoslovak mortars and machine guns.

Three days of fighting

Han’s troops advanced in several separate columns that were unable to support one another. At about 3 p.m. on 4 October the Independent 6th Brigade came within two or three kilometres of Huangqiao on the road from Guxi. There it was attacked by Ye Fei’s 1st Column, while the other columns closed the ring. The brigade was destroyed within three hours, and Weng Da committed suicide. At the same time the 33rd Division of the 89th Army attacked the town itself, which was weakly held, and according to communist accounts almost broke into it. The main body of the 89th Army, which was supposed to support it, never arrived. On hearing of Weng Da’s fate, Li Shouwei halted it and ordered it to dig in where it stood.

On 5 October the units that had destroyed the Independent 6th Brigade fell on the 33rd Division. According to communist accounts there were several bayonet fights. The division was thrown back and broken up, and its commander, General Sun Qiren, was taken prisoner. During the night of 5–6 October and on 6 October the New Fourth Army surrounded and destroyed the rest of the 89th Army. Li Shouwei ordered a retreat. According to one account, while crossing the Bachi River he lost his grip on the tail of the horse he was holding on to and drowned. His wife later identified his body among the corpses pulled from the water. The troops of the two Lis and Chen Taiyun watched the defeat of Han’s forces without lifting a finger and suffered no losses. The remaining government units withdrew. Han Deqin took refuge in Xinghua with about a thousand men.

Local tradition has preserved from this battle the memory of the Huangqiao flatbreads (huangqiao shaobing), which the inhabitants baked day and night and carried to the soldiers in their positions. Communist propaganda turned them into a symbol of popular support, and in 1949 the flatbreads reportedly found their way onto the banquet held to mark the proclamation of the People’s Republic of China.

Losses

The casualty figures come almost entirely from the parties to the conflict and differ widely. According to communist summaries, between 3 and 6 October twelve regiments of Han’s main forces were destroyed, along with one entire security brigade and a regiment each from two others – more than 11,000 men in all, including about 3,800 taken prisoner. The commander of the 89th Army, the commander of the Independent 6th Brigade and several brigade and regimental commanders were killed, and more than 30 officers of the rank of colonel and above, including the commander of the 33rd Division, and around 600 junior officers were captured. The communists claimed to have taken about 3,800 rifles, 189 machine guns, 59 mortars and 3 mountain guns. Nationalist sources spoke of roughly 5,000 killed and wounded. The New Fourth Army’s losses, according to communist sources, did not exceed a thousand men, and according to some studies amounted to about 900.

After the battle

The New Fourth Army followed up its success. It took Hai’an, Dongtai and once again Jiangyan, and on 10 October its vanguard met Huang Kecheng’s Eighth Route Army column at Baiju in Dongtai county. In this way the two communist armies linked their areas for the first time. The pursuit of Han to Xinghua, the seat of the provincial government, was abandoned for political reasons. In November a joint headquarters of the New Fourth Army and the Eighth Route Army in central China was set up at Hai’an and later at Yancheng. Ye Ting was nominally at its head, but it was actually commanded by Chen Yi, with Liu Shaoqi as political commissar. The communists now had an extensive, permanent base in central Jiangsu, which survived until the end of the war.

To this day the two sides describe the battle differently. According to the communists it was a defence against Kuomintang “die-hards” who had attacked first while the New Fourth Army was fighting the Japanese. According to the nationalists, the communists had unlawfully left their assigned zones, cut the links between government units on either side of the Yangtze, seized territory that was not theirs and attacked government troops instead of fighting the Japanese. The British historian Gregor Benton, author of the most comprehensive history of the New Fourth Army, points out that the communist expansion in Jiangsu had been planned in advance, and that the Kuomintang, in demanding that their armies move north, also had its own aims. Throughout 1940 both sides were preparing for a showdown. What is beyond dispute is that at Huangqiao the government army suffered a defeat that had nothing to do with the war against Japan, and that on the Jiangsu plains, close to Japanese garrisons, several thousand Chinese soldiers were killed or captured by other Chinese.

Place in the war

The Battle of Huangqiao proved to be the last step before the open rupture of the United Front. On 19 October 1940 the Chief of the General Staff, He Yingqin, and his deputy, Bai Chongxi, sent Zhu De, Peng Dehuai, Ye Ting and Xiang Ying a telegram listing the seizure of Huangqiao, the attack on Han and the death of Li Shouwei as examples of disobedience to orders, and demanding that all units of the Eighth Route Army and the New Fourth Army operating south of the Yellow River move north of it within a month. By then, after the Hundred Regiments Offensive, the government knew how much the communist forces had grown. The communists replied on 9 November, rejecting the accusations, but agreed to move the New Fourth Army’s units in southern Anhui to the north of the Yangtze. At the end of November another battle was fought in Jiangsu, at Caodian, this time on communist initiative.

In January 1941, when the New Fourth Army’s headquarters column, some 9,000 men, set out from southern Anhui, it was surrounded at Maolin by the troops of the 3rd War Zone. After a week of fighting most of the soldiers had been killed or captured, Ye Ting was imprisoned, and Xiang Ying was killed shortly afterwards by one of his own men. On 17 January Chiang Kai-shek announced the disbandment of the New Fourth Army. The communists immediately re-formed it in Jiangsu, with Chen Yi as commander and Liu Shaoqi as commissar, on precisely the territory won at Huangqiao. Historians in mainland China regard the battle as the direct cause of that incident. From then on the United Front existed in name only. The two parties fought Japan separately and prepared for the reckoning with each other that came after 1945. Huangqiao had one more epilogue: in August 1946, by then during the civil war, Su Yu again routed government troops in the same area. For the Chinese communists the battle of October 1940 was proof that their armies could defeat the Kuomintang army in the open field. For Chiang Kai-shek it was a warning that the ally of 1937 had become his most dangerous rival.