The Battle of Taierzhuang begins

On 24 March 1938 units of the Japanese 10th Division launched an assault on Taierzhuang (also spelled Tai’erzhuang), a small walled town on the northern bank of the Grand Canal, some 30 kilometres north-east of Xuzhou. It was defended by the Chinese 31st Division under General Chi Fengcheng, which had arrived two days earlier. In the evening some three hundred Japanese broke in through a breach by the north-eastern gate, but they were driven back into the temple of the city god and died there when the defenders set the building on fire. So began the battle that the Chinese still call the “great victory at Taierzhuang”. It lasted until 7 April, turned into ferocious street fighting for every house, and ended with the retreat of the shattered Japanese detachments. It was China’s first major victory in the war with Japan and the first proof that the Imperial Japanese Army was not invincible.

The date of its beginning is given variously. The first clashes beneath the town walls took place as early as 23 March, and some accounts and some Chinese studies date the battle from that day. On 24 March, the date adopted by other chronologies, the Japanese launched their first assault on Taierzhuang itself, and the Chinese troops went over to the attack for the first time, in accordance with the orders of Li Zongren, commander of the 5th War Zone.

The war after the fall of Nanjing

After the defeat at Shanghai and the fall of Nanjing in December 1937, many observers believed that China would sue for peace. It did not. The government of Chiang Kai-shek moved to Wuhan and announced that it would wage a protracted war, trading space for time. On 16 January 1938 the Japanese prime minister, Fumimaro Konoe, declared that his government would “not deal” with the Nationalist government, which closed the road to negotiations. In February both countries recalled their ambassadors.

The General Staff in Tokyo wanted to avoid new large-scale operations for most of 1938, to rebuild its forces and to strike only later. The Japanese armies in China, however, had plans of their own. The North China Area Army under General Hisaichi Terauchi and the Central China Expeditionary Army wanted to link the territories they had occupied in the north and in the Yangtze valley along the Tianjin–Pukou railway. At its centre lay Xuzhou, the junction where the north–south line was crossed by the Longhai railway, running from the east coast into the interior. Whoever held Xuzhou could move troops across the whole of Central China and threaten Wuhan.

In the north the Japanese quickly occupied Shandong province. Its governor, Han Fuju, withdrew his troops almost without a fight, giving up Jinan, and Qingdao fell in January. Chiang had him arrested, and on 24 January 1938 Han was shot in Wuchang. It was the first execution of so senior a commander for fleeing before the enemy, and a warning to other generals. In the south Japanese troops from the Nanjing area advanced along the railway towards the Huai River and in February took Bengbu, but they were halted at the river itself.

An army of many armies

The defence of Xuzhou was directed by Li Zongren, commander of the 5th War Zone and leader of the Guangxi clique, who only a few years earlier had been fighting Chiang Kai-shek. His old comrade Bai Chongxi, deputy chief of the General Staff, was sent to assist him. Li Zongren’s forces were a patchwork of provincial armies: soldiers from Guangxi, units of Feng Yuxiang’s former Northwest Army, Sichuanese troops whom other commanders had refused to take because of their poor equipment and lack of discipline, and the remnants of forces from Shandong and Manchuria. Only in March did Chiang send him some of his best, German-trained units: General Tang Enbo’s 20th Corps with its artillery, including 155 mm guns, and General Sun Lianzhong’s 2nd Army Group.

In March two Japanese divisions set off south from Shandong towards Xuzhou. In the west, along the railway, came General Rensuke Isogai’s 10th Division; in the east, the 5th Division of General Seishirō Itagaki – the same man who in 1931 had engineered the Mukden incident. Both belonged to the 2nd Army and were regarded as among the best in the Japanese army. At Linyi the troops of Pang Bingxun and General Zhang Zizhong’s 59th Army stopped Itagaki’s force in heavy fighting that went on for several weeks. In the west, however, the 10th Division broke through the defences of the Sichuanese. On 17 March Wang Mingzhang, commander of the 122nd Division, was killed defending Tengxian, and on 18 March the town fell. The same day the Japanese took Yixian (Yi). The Japanese detachment of Major General Hajime Seya, pushed far ahead of the rest of the division, moved on Taierzhuang to seize the crossings over the Grand Canal and open the way to Xuzhou.

The Japanese were partly acting on their own initiative. The General Staff had allowed the 2nd Army limited operations in southern Shandong, but not a major offensive. The divisional commanders believed that the Chinese troops would scatter as they had at Shanghai and Nanjing, and did not expect serious resistance. Li Zongren meant to exploit this overconfidence: to pin down the advanced detachment at Taierzhuang and then close in on its flank and rear with Tang Enbo’s forces.

The assault on the town

Taierzhuang was a market town of a few thousand inhabitants on the canal, with stone houses, narrow lanes and a wall with gates. A branch railway line from Lincheng also ran there. Chi Fengcheng’s 31st Division, part of Sun Lianzhong’s 2nd Army Group, arrived on 22 March with orders to hold the town until the remaining units came up. On 23 March it went out to meet the Japanese and fought the first engagements with them on the hills north of the walls. On 24 March Japanese forces several thousand strong, supported by tanks, artillery and aircraft, attacked from several directions and forced the Chinese back behind the walls. In the evening came the first breach by the north-eastern gate.

Over the following days the Japanese shelled the town with artillery and bombed it from the air, then stormed it again and again. By 27 March they had taken part of the eastern quarter. On 29 March they breached the wall and the fighting moved inside the town. Here the Japanese superiority in artillery and aircraft lost its significance, since the opponents were often separated by a single wall. The fighting was with rifles, grenades, bayonets and knives, mostly at night. Soldiers knocked holes in the walls of houses to fire into the next room, and a single building could be fought over for days on end. Chi Fengcheng later recalled that both sides would sometimes be hacking a hole through the same wall at the same time. American and European observers compared the fighting with what was to happen in the cities of Europe a few years later.

The Chinese paid an enormous price. Of the roughly 9,000 men of the 31st Division, only 2,000 are said to have answered the roll call after the battle. The command imposed iron discipline: officers were forbidden to retreat, and according to Li Zongren’s own memoirs he threatened Tang Enbo, who was slow to attack, that if he did not carry out his orders he would share the fate of Han Fuju. “Dare-to-die” squads armed with bundles of grenades were sent against the Japanese tanks. German 37 mm anti-tank guns destroyed Japanese armoured vehicles at close range. On 1 April Chiang Kai-shek demanded by telegram that the enemy at Taierzhuang be destroyed. In the fighting up to 4 April the Japanese took about two-thirds of the town, but the Chinese did not give up the southern gate, through which ammunition and reinforcements reached them by night.

Closing the trap

The outcome of the battle was decided by what happened outside the walls. Tang Enbo’s 20th Corps, which under the plan was to have struck earlier, attacked from the north and east in the last days of March and the first days of April, cutting Seya’s detachment off from its rear. Other Chinese units cut the railway behind the Japanese. The relief force sent by Itagaki’s 5th Division, the detachment of General Jun Sakamoto, was itself caught in a pincer. The Chinese air force, flying mostly Soviet aircraft, bombed the Japanese columns. The Japanese in Taierzhuang began to run short of ammunition, fuel and food, and most of the supplies dropped from the air fell into Chinese hands.

On 6 April the Chinese troops launched a general offensive. On 7 April the Japanese detachments withdrew to the north, abandoning some of their heavy equipment, lorries and guns. At the same time an extraordinary congress of the Kuomintang was sitting in Wuchang (29 March – 1 April); it elected Chiang Kai-shek leader of the party and adopted a programme of resistance. The news of the victory reached Wuhan, where crowds many thousands strong celebrated it.

The cost of victory

The losses on both sides are disputed. Chinese communiqués spoke of more than 20,000 Japanese killed. The American officer Frank Dorn, who was in China at the time, wrote of 16,000 dead, and the historian Stephen MacKinnon gave 15,000–20,000. Most modern Western historians, such as Rana Mitter and Peter Harmsen, put Japanese losses at around 8,000 killed or around 20,000 killed and wounded. Japanese documents give even lower figures: according to research by the Chinese historian Jiang Keshi, based on Japanese reports, a few hundred Japanese were killed at Taierzhuang itself, and the total losses of the detachments engaged there did not exceed 2,500 killed and wounded. Official Japanese tallies for the entire campaign from February to May 1938 record 2,130 killed and some 8,600 wounded. What is certain is that Chinese losses were at least comparable and, by many estimates, considerably greater: figures of around 20,000 killed and wounded are cited, and Dorn even wrote of more than 15,000 dead. The town itself was reduced to ruins.

Significance

Japan denied its defeat for several days, but for China Taierzhuang became a symbol. After months of retreats, the fall of Shanghai and Nanjing and the news of the Nanjing massacre, this was the first battle won in which armies from different provinces, until recently hostile to one another and to Chiang Kai-shek, had beaten elite Japanese divisions. Li Zongren called the victory “the first joyful moment since the beginning of the War of Resistance”, and the world press wrote about the battle. Foreign journalists and film-makers came to Taierzhuang, among them the photographer Robert Capa and the crew of the Dutch documentary-maker Joris Ivens, who was making a film about the war in China.

The victory had its limits, however. It did not change the balance of forces, and its exaggeration by propaganda angered the Japanese. Stung by the defeat, the Japanese command abandoned its cautious plans: on 7 April, the day of the retreat from Taierzhuang, Imperial General Headquarters ordered the destruction of the Chinese forces in the Xuzhou area. More divisions were sent into the fight from the north and the south. The Chinese, for their part, encouraged by their success, drew more armies to Xuzhou, which were soon in danger of encirclement.

The Battle of Taierzhuang also showed how both countries would fight a war that was to last another seven years and become part of the Second World War. Japan could win campaigns and take cities, but it could not destroy the Chinese army or force China to capitulate. China, technically weaker, could keep resisting, paying for every month with enormous losses. This war of attrition tied down an ever greater part of the Japanese army and led Tokyo to seek raw materials and a solution elsewhere: in 1940 and 1941 in Indochina and across South-East Asia, which led to war with the United States and Britain.