The Chinese winter offensive of 1939–1940 was the first attempt in the war to wrest the initiative from the Japanese along the whole front at once. For more than two years China had been on the defensive, giving up ground, and every great battle, from Shanghai to Wuhan, had ended in the loss of more cities. In the autumn of 1939, after the defence of Changsha, the government of Chiang Kai-shek concluded that the Japanese army was overstretched and weakened, and decided to strike. From the turn of November and December 1939 Chinese forces attacked from the deserts of Suiyuan in the north to the mountains of southern Guangxi on the border with Indochina. The heaviest fighting took place in December and January around Wuhan, on the Yangtze and at the Kunlun Pass north of Nanning. The Chinese recaptured the pass, cut shipping on the Yangtze for several days and inflicted losses on the Japanese such as they had not suffered for a long time. They did not, however, take any of their assigned objectives, and in February the Japanese replied with counter-offensives which in Guangxi ended in a Chinese defeat. The offensive decided nothing, but it changed Japanese thinking about the war in China.

Name and dates

In China the operation is called simply the “winter offensive” (冬季攻勢, dongji gongshi), and in the official historiography of the Republic of China the “winter offensive of the 28th year”, that is, the 28th year of the Republic, 1939. The Japanese used the same name (tōki kōsei). It was not a single battle but a series of parallel attacks in more than a dozen areas, conducted by different war zones, each with its own course and its own dates. Some Chinese studies also include fighting that the Japanese began, such as the battle in southern Guangxi and the fighting in Suiyuan.

The offensive is dated from 26 November 1939, the starting point used by the official history of the war published by the Ministry of National Defence of the Republic of China. At the end of November the first diversionary operations began in the zones that were to draw Japanese attention away. Japanese studies, including the official war history published by the Japanese Defence Agency, begin the offensive in early December, and the main attack on the Japanese 11th Army around Wuhan was launched on 12 December. The end is put at 1 April 1940, when the troops of the 8th War Zone finally recaptured Wuyuan in western Suiyuan. That date is given by the Chinese official history; the Taiwanese study by Hsu Long-hsuen and Chang Ming-kai speaks more generally of “the end of March”. The main fighting, however, was shorter: most Chinese war zones broke off their attacks in the second half of January (the 5th War Zone was ordered to halt its offensive on 28 January), and Japanese studies close the offensive in February 1940.

Background

A war in stalemate. After the fall of Wuhan and Canton (Guangzhou) in October 1938, the Sino-Japanese War entered what Chinese historians call the second stage, or the period of stalemate. Japan had some 850,000 soldiers in China and could no longer afford new large offensives into the interior. Tokyo therefore decided to hold the territory it had occupied, strike only at dangerous Chinese concentrations and seek a political solution. In 1939 the Japanese were in talks with Wang Jingwei, one of the leaders of the Kuomintang, who had fled Chongqing and was preparing a government that would collaborate with Japan. At the same time the army was converting many of its large four-regiment divisions into smaller three-regiment ones, and raising new, weaker divisions and independent mixed brigades to garrison the occupied territories.

The year 1939 dealt Japan several blows. In August the Red Army destroyed Japanese forces at Khalkhin Gol, and Germany, with which Tokyo had been discussing an alliance, concluded a pact with the Soviet Union. Nobuyuki Abe’s new government announced that Japan would not involve itself in the war in Europe and would concentrate on ending the “China Incident”. In September a joint command of all forces in China was established – the China Expeditionary Army in Nanjing – under General Toshizō Nishio, with Lieutenant General Seishirō Itagaki as chief of staff. Under it came Lieutenant General Hayao Tada’s North China Area Army in Beijing, Lieutenant General Yasuji Okamura’s 11th Army in Wuhan, the 13th Army in Shanghai, Lieutenant General Rikichi Andō’s 21st Army in Canton and, in Inner Mongolia, Lieutenant General Naosaburō Okabe’s Mongolia Garrison Army.

Chinese preparations. The Chinese used 1939 to rebuild their army. From June the divisions shattered in earlier battles were withdrawn from the front in turn for several months of training and replenishment, the so-called second training. In the summer and autumn Chinese forces repulsed two Japanese attacks: in May at Suixian and Zaoyang in Hubei, and in October at Changsha, which Chongqing proclaimed a great victory. The Chinese command concluded that the Japanese were dispersed over a vast area, had no reserves, and could not seize and hold new territory without reinforcements from Japan.

On 10 October 1939 the operations department of the Military Affairs Commission drew up a plan for a winter offensive. According to Chinese studies, more than 80 divisions – almost half the army – were to take part. The plan was approved by the second military conference at Nanyue in Hunan, which sat from the end of October to the beginning of November. There Chiang Kai-shek announced the shift “from defence to attack”. According to Chinese studies, he issued the order for the offensive on 18 November. The retrained troops, whose training had been completed a month earlier than planned, were sent to the four zones that were to deliver the main blows: Yan Xishan’s 2nd War Zone in Shanxi, General Gu Zhutong’s 3rd War Zone south of the lower Yangtze, Li Zongren’s 5th War Zone north and west of Wuhan, and General Xue Yue’s 9th War Zone in Hunan and Jiangxi. The remaining zones – General Wei Lihuang’s 1st in Henan, General Zhang Fakui’s 4th in Guangdong and Guangxi, and the 8th in Suiyuan, together with the Hebei–Chahar and Shandong–Jiangsu guerrilla war zones behind Japanese lines – were to mount supporting attacks with the forces they already had and to sabotage the railways.

The objectives were highly ambitious. On the central front the aim was to smash the Japanese 11th Army, cut it off from its rear and, at best, recapture Wuhan. On the Yangtze the 3rd War Zone was to cut the river traffic on which the supply of the Japanese forces in Wuhan depended. In the north the targets were the railways in Shanxi and Henan, including Kaifeng, and in the far north Baotou, the main Japanese base in Suiyuan.

Southern Guangxi. Just before the offensive the Japanese themselves struck in the south. On 15 November 1939 Lieutenant General Hitoshi Imamura’s 5th Division and the Taiwan Mixed Brigade landed on the Gulf of Tonkin, and on 24 November they took Nanning in order to cut the route by which most of China’s foreign supplies flowed in from French Indochina. In early December the Japanese also seized the Kunlun Pass (Kunlunguan) on the road from Nanning to Binyang and Liuzhou. Chiang Kai-shek regarded the recapture of Nanning as a matter of the first importance and sent troops from Hunan to Guangxi, among them General Du Yuming’s 5th Corps, the only Chinese armoured formation. He entrusted the direction of the fighting to General Bai Chongxi, head of the field headquarters in Guilin. The fighting for Nanning became part of the winter offensive.

Course of the offensive

The north: Shanxi, Henan and fighting behind the lines

One of the main blows was to fall in Shanxi. The troops of the 2nd War Zone were to cut the Tongpu railway, which ran through the province from north to south, and take the Japanese strongpoints along it, while in the east, in the mountains of the south-east of the province, the 27th and 40th Corps were to tie down Japanese forces around Changzhi and Gaoping. The Japanese, however, pre-empted the offensive. From 3 to 17 December the Japanese 37th Division conducted its own operation in the Zhongtiao Mountains in southern Shanxi, by the bend of the Yellow River, and struck at the Chinese forces concentrated there before they could move. In the east the Japanese 36th Division mounted a series of operations against the 27th and 40th Corps around Gaoping from 19 December to 24 January.

The offensive in Shanxi was also paralysed by conflict within the Chinese camp. Since 1937 Yan Xishan, who with brief interruptions had ruled the province since 1911, had been cooperating with the Communists. With their help he had created the so-called New Army, the “Dare-to-Die” units (Juesidui), in which members of the Chinese Communist Party held the key posts and which by 1939 had outgrown his old army in numbers. When Yan began to take control of it, and of the counties, away from the Communists, conflict broke out. At the turn of November and December 1939, at the very start of the offensive, fighting broke out in western Shanxi between the old and the new armies, known as the “Western Shanxi Incident” or the “December Incident”. The two sides describe it differently to this day. Kuomintang historiography and Yan himself speak of a mutiny by the New Army, which on 28 November began murdering officers of the old army; Communist historiography speaks of an attack by Yan, who is said to have treacherously turned on his allies. The outcome was unambiguous: the New Army broke away from Yan and came under the Communist Eighth Route Army, and Yan lost a large part of his troops and influence in the province. According to the Chinese official history, this is why the 2nd War Zone failed to carry out the plan. From February 1940 there was already open fighting in Hebei between Kuomintang troops and the Eighth Route Army.

As a result, the attack in Shanxi achieved nothing. The troops of the 2nd War Zone took none of their assigned towns or Japanese strongpoints and failed to cut the Tongpu railway, except for the stretch between Wenxi and Anyi. The zone reported 13,770 Japanese killed and wounded. In Henan Wei Lihuang’s 1st War Zone began operations as early as 1 December. According to Chinese accounts, its units broke into Kaifeng, the former provincial capital, in mid-December, but were quickly driven out. In the Hebei–Chahar and Shandong–Jiangsu war zones, behind Japanese lines, government units tore up the tracks of the Beijing–Hankou and Tianjin–Pukou railways from December onwards, to little effect.

Suiyuan: Baotou

In the far north, in Suiyuan, the 8th War Zone struck, its troops on this sector commanded by its deputy commander, General Fu Zuoyi. His 35th Corps resorted to a ruse. The Japanese command in Baotou, where the Japanese Cavalry Group was stationed, received word that strong Chinese forces were approaching from the west. On the morning of 20 December the Japanese sent the main body of the garrison westwards. Once it had left the town, Chinese soldiers disguised as civilians broke into Baotou from the north-west, and street fighting began. Two Japanese cavalry regiments that set out to relieve the town were surrounded on the way. One of them lost more than half its men, and the commander of the other was killed. The Japanese brought up reinforcements from Inner Mongolia and went over to the attack on 22 December, and on 23 December the Chinese withdrew from the town. The raid took by surprise the Japanese, who had not expected such an action from the troops in Suiyuan.

Around Wuhan: the 5th and 9th War Zones

The most important part of the offensive was fought around Wuhan, where Okamura’s Japanese 11th Army was stationed. Its staff, warned by the command in Nanjing of Chinese preparations, did not take them seriously. Accustomed to the feeble Chinese attack of April 1939, the staff officers concluded, according to the Japanese official history, that a Chinese “general counter-offensive” was “a madman’s dream”. On 12 December 1939 Chinese forces attacked along the whole front of the 11th Army, from northern Hubei through the environs of Wuhan to northern Jiangxi. Japanese studies estimate that in the course of about forty days some 71 divisions in all – more than half a million soldiers – were thrown against the 11th Army. The Chinese attacked at night, stealthily surrounded Japanese posts and fought with grenades. The Japanese garrisons, scattered a few kilometres apart, were encircled in many places, and the 11th Army, with no reserves, patched up the front with hastily assembled detachments and supplied cut-off outposts from the air.

North and west of Wuhan, Li Zongren’s 5th War Zone attacked. Its groups struck at the Japanese 13th Division around Zhongxiang, at the 3rd Division north of Yingshan and towards Xinyang on the Beijing–Hankou railway, and at the 39th Division. According to Japanese figures, 49 Chinese divisions attacked the 13th Division alone. The group that had crossed the Han River was pushed back across it by 23 December. The others failed to reach their objectives, and Japanese trains could still move troops along the railway to threatened sectors. In January the Japanese 3rd Division went over to the counter-attack. On 28 January the Military Affairs Commission ordered the 5th War Zone to halt its offensive.

To the south, in Hunan, southern Hubei and northern Jiangxi, Xue Yue’s 9th War Zone attacked – Xue being the victor of Changsha. Its task was to cut the northern section of the Canton–Hankou railway and to advance on Wuchang. According to Chinese studies, on 12 December the Chinese 20th Corps took Chongyang in southern Hubei and broke up Japanese reinforcements, while other corps attacked Japanese positions in the mountains on the borders of Hubei, Hunan and Jiangxi, around Wuning and on the railway near Yueyang. The Japanese 6th Division, which according to Japanese figures was attacked by 16 Chinese divisions, repelled them only around 24 December, with the help of the neighbouring 40th Division and reinforcements from army level. The Chinese, however, did not withdraw but stayed in the mountains, and the Japanese were still conducting mopping-up operations there in January. The operations of the 9th War Zone continued until 20 January 1940.

On the Yangtze: the 3rd War Zone

South of the lower Yangtze, in Anhui, Gu Zhutong’s 3rd War Zone was ordered to cut the shipping on the river. A special group of fourteen divisions was formed for the purpose. The Japanese 13th Army expected an attack and on 12 December ordered the 116th Division to forestall it, but it was too late. On the morning of 16 December about four Chinese divisions, with a dozen or more field and mountain guns, struck from the Qingyang area at the positions of the 116th Division. The next day the Chinese broke through the Japanese defensive line and reached the river near Datong, where shipping on the Yangtze was interrupted for a time. Small units with anti-tank guns fired on Japanese transports sailing upriver, and mines were floated down the water. A Japanese counter-attack on Qingyang, begun on 23 December, collapsed after three days. Chinese units went on hampering the shipping for several more months, until they were driven back by a Japanese operation in the second half of April 1940.

Guangdong

In the south the Japanese themselves took the offensive. In mid-December Andō’s 21st Army set out from the Canton area northwards towards Yingde and Wengyuan, along the railway to Hankou and the North River (Bei Jiang), in order to forestall the attack of the 4th War Zone and smash its forces in northern Guangdong. The Chinese call this fighting the First Battle of Northern Guangdong. When the situation in Guangxi became dangerous, the Japanese broke off the operation and began to withdraw, and the Chinese forces set off in pursuit. From 1 January they retook one place after another: Yingde on 5 January, and by 16 January several small towns on the railway north of Canton.

Guangxi: the Kunlun Pass

The most famous Chinese victory of the offensive was won in Guangxi. On the night of 17–18 December the troops massed north of Nanning – some 25 divisions according to Japanese figures – went over to the attack. The main blow, against the Kunlun Pass, was delivered by Du Yuming’s 5th Corps with three divisions – the 200th Division, the 1st Honour Division and the New 22nd Division – supported by tanks and artillery. The pass was held by a Japanese battalion entrenched on the surrounding hills. On the first day the Chinese took the main position, but the next day it was retaken by Colonel Kichinosuke Miki’s regiment, sent by Imamura from Nanning. There followed almost two weeks of fighting for the surrounding hills, which changed hands many times.

The key proved to be cutting the pass off from Nanning. The New 22nd Division outflanked the Japanese positions and blocked the road south of the pass, while other Chinese units held up Japanese reinforcements coming from Nanning and from the coast. Major General Masao Nakamura of the 21st Brigade, sent to the rescue, became stuck on the road with a regiment and on 23 December was seriously wounded. He died on 25 December. His replacement, Colonel Gen’ichi Sakata, commander of the 42nd Regiment, was also killed, as was Colonel Miki. The Japanese units at the pass were supplied from the air. In the last days of December the Chinese took more of the hills around the pass; on 30 December the Japanese command decided to abandon it, and on 31 December the Kunlun Pass was again in Chinese hands.

Chinese propaganda announced the destruction of the entire 21st Brigade and claimed that more than 4,000 Japanese had been killed in it, including 85 per cent of its officers. Japanese reports gave much lower figures: according to them, Miki’s regiment together with an attached battalion lost 376 killed, 755 wounded and 37 missing. In January 1940, however, the Japanese army sent the 5th Division more than 3,300 replacements, and almost 2,700 of them went to the two regiments that had fought for the pass. In any event, an elite Japanese brigade had been badly bled. Chinese losses were higher than Japanese: the two divisions of the 5th Corps that attacked frontally lost more than two thousand men in the first six days alone, and according to Chinese studies Chinese losses in the whole battle for the pass exceeded ten thousand killed and wounded.

After taking the pass, the Chinese tried to push on to Nanning, but became bogged down at Jiutang and Batang. The exhausted 5th Corps was withdrawn to rest on 12 January. Chiang Kai-shek flew to Guilin and on 10 January conferred with Bai Chongxi, Chen Cheng and Zhang Fakui near the front. Bai proposed an immediate attack on Nanning with fresh corps before Japanese reinforcements could arrive. Chiang at first agreed, but the next day changed his mind and ordered a switch to the defensive.

Japanese counter-offensives

The Japanese made good use of this time. They moved the 18th Division and the Guards Mixed Brigade from Guangdong to Guangxi, and from 10 January naval aircraft bombed Liuzhou, Guilin and Chinese roads, gaining complete air superiority. On 23 January Andō himself arrived in Nanning. On 28 January the Binyang operation began. While the 5th Division attacked the Kunlun Pass frontally, the 18th Division and part of the Guards crossed to the far bank of the Yong River, outflanked the Chinese positions from the east and came out in their rear. On 1 February Chiang Kai-shek relieved Bai Chongxi of command and handed it to Zhang Fakui, but it was too late. Japanese aircraft bombed the headquarters of one of the Chinese army groups at Binyang, communications broke down, and some commanders withdrew their units without orders. On 2 February the Japanese entered Binyang, and on 3 February they retook the Kunlun Pass. The Chinese corps scattered into the mountains. Lacking the strength to hold their new gains, the Japanese returned to the Nanning area on 13 February. The South China Area Army was formed in Canton under Andō’s command, and a new 22nd Army in Nanning.

The defeat at Binyang robbed the Chinese victory at Kunlun of its meaning. From 22 February Chiang Kai-shek held a four-day conference at Liuzhou with more than a hundred generals. Bai Chongxi and Chen Cheng, head of the political department of the Military Affairs Commission, were each reduced by one rank, two army group commanders were arrested and court-martialled, and several corps and division commanders were removed from their posts. According to Chinese historians, no other battle of the war ended with so many generals being punished at once. On 26 February Zhang Fakui declared that the recapture of Nanning was no longer necessary.

In the north the Japanese Mongolia Garrison Army responded to the raid on Baotou with an operation against Fu Zuoyi’s forces. On 28 January Lieutenant General Shigenori Kuroda’s 26th Division, the Cavalry Group and collaborationist units set out westwards from Baotou into the depths of Suiyuan, and on 3 February occupied Wuyuan, which the Chinese had abandoned, and then Linhe. Fu Zuoyi avoided a decisive battle and withdrew into the mountains. Tokyo would not agree to a permanent occupation of western Suiyuan, so the Japanese withdrew most of their troops, leaving the towns to collaborators. According to Chinese and Western studies, the Japanese also wanted to open a route to Ningxia and the Gansu Corridor, through which supplies from the Soviet Union flowed into China, and to set up there a small state of the Hui Muslims, similar to Mengjiang. On the night of 20–21 March Fu Zuoyi’s troops recaptured Wuyuan by surprise. The Japanese sent reinforcements and took the town again on 26 March, but could not hold it. At the end of March they withdrew eastwards, and on 1 April Chinese cavalry and guerrillas finally recovered Wuyuan. According to Chinese sources, the Japanese used chemical weapons in the fighting in Suiyuan.

Losses

The casualty figures, as throughout this war, are very uncertain. The Chinese official history states that 77,386 Japanese were killed and wounded in the winter offensive and more than 400 taken prisoner. According to the Japanese official history, the China Expeditionary Army as a whole lost some 4,600 killed and 12,400 wounded between December 1939 and the end of January 1940, by which time the offensive had largely petered out; of these, the 11th Army around Wuhan lost 2,141 killed and 6,216 wounded. The heaviest losses were suffered by the 13th Division, which fought the 5th War Zone. These figures do not cover all the fighting in Guangxi. An incomplete Japanese tabulation shows the scale of the change: in November 1939 the Expeditionary Army had some 2,800 wounded in action, in December more than 18,600. Chinese researchers, on the basis of replacement data, believe that the Japanese figures for the dead are understated.

Chinese losses were certainly many times higher. According to Chinese figures, the 5th, 6th and 9th War Zones lost almost 27,000 killed, more than 36,000 wounded and some 5,000 missing between December and the end of January, and the zones in the north almost 16,000 men in all. To this must be added the losses in Guangdong and in Guangxi, where, according to the Chinese official history, more than 64,000 soldiers were killed, wounded or missing in the whole battle of southern Guangxi – and that without some of the units. The Japanese claimed that the 11th Army alone had counted some 51,000 bodies of Chinese soldiers, and the forces in North China more than 37,000. These figures cannot be verified.

Significance

The winter offensive did not achieve the objectives set for it. The Chinese did not retake Wuhan, Kaifeng, Xinyang, Baotou or Nanning, did not cut any important railway for long, and lost the Kunlun Pass, their only major gain, in February. Chiang Kai-shek admitted that no important strategic point had been taken, and from 6 March 1940 he spent four days in Chongqing reviewing the course of the offensive with the chiefs of staff of the war zones. He repeated that strategically China had to wage a protracted war, but in individual operations had to act swiftly and offensively. Historians point to poor coordination between the zones and the reluctance of many commanders to risk their own troops. Many divisions lacked artillery and supplies, and regional commanders protected the units on which their own position depended. The Japanese, who controlled the air and held the railways, could shift reserves from sector to sector, as at Binyang.

Even so, the offensive made a great impression on the Japanese side. The Japanese army had not expected that the Chinese, after two years of defeats, would be able to strike along the whole front at once. Reports of the Expeditionary Army noted that the Chinese troops had fought with rare determination and were well trained. The 11th Army concluded that the offensive had shown the strength of the rebuilt Chinese army and that the government in Chongqing still controlled it. The command in Nanjing also saw a political purpose in it: to undermine the government of Wang Jingwei, which was proclaimed in Nanjing on 30 March 1940 and did not end the war.

Tokyo was then considering a reduction of its forces in China. The offensive, however, convinced the command in Nanjing and the 11th Army that they could not wait passively for the Chinese to rebuild their army and strike again. In the spring of 1940 the 11th Army carried out a large operation in Hubei in which, in June, it took Yichang on the Yangtze, the gateway to Sichuan, and the air force stepped up the bombing of Chongqing. The destruction of the 9th War Zone’s forces remained the aim of the 11th Army, which attacked Changsha three more times.

The offensive also exposed a deep rift in the United Front between the Kuomintang and the Communists. The fighting in Shanxi at the turn of 1939 and 1940, and later in Hebei, opened a period of increasingly bitter clashes which in January 1941 led to the destruction of the Communist New Fourth Army by government troops in southern Anhui. In August 1940 the Communist Eighth Route Army launched its own large offensive in North China, known as the Hundred Regiments Offensive. The winter offensive proved to be the government army’s last attempt in the war at a general offensive along the whole front. Thereafter China mounted only local counter-offensives, and the war remained in a stalemate from which it was released only when Japan went to war with the United States and Great Britain in December 1941.

The Chinese winter offensive of 1939–1940