Salween offensive

The Salween offensive was the largest offensive operation mounted by the armies of Nationalist China against the Japanese in the last years of the war, and the only one in which the Chinese drove the Japanese out of ground they intended to hold. Between May 1944 and January 1945 the Chinese Expeditionary Force of General Wei Lihuang – “Y Force” in American terminology – crossed the deep gorge of the Salween in western Yunnan, took the mountain fortress of Song Shan, the walled town of Tengchong and the road junction of Longling, and then pushed the Japanese 56th Division back along the Burma Road to the Burmese border. At the end of January 1945 it met the Chinese divisions trained in India, which were advancing towards it from northern Burma. After almost three years of blockade, the land route to China was open again.

It was a campaign fought in some of the most difficult terrain in the world – in mountains 3,000 metres high, in the monsoon season, with supplies carried by porters and mules or dropped from aircraft. The Chinese paid a very high price for it. The Japanese garrisons, though many times weaker, fought almost to the last man.

Name and dates

In English-language writing the fighting is called the Salween Campaign; in Chinese, the counter-offensive in western Yunnan (Dianxi fangong), which together with the fighting of the Chinese Army in India in northern Burma makes up the “battle of northern Burma and western Yunnan” (Dianxi Mianbei zhanyi). The Japanese call the fighting for the two besieged garrisons the Battle of Lamong and Tengyue (Ramō–Tōetsu no tatakai); Lamong (Chinese: Lameng) is the Japanese name for Song Shan. In Chinese the river itself is called the Nu Jiang, the “Angry River”; the name Salween comes from Burmese.

The offensive began on the night of 10–11 May 1944, when the first Chinese units started to cross the river; the main forces crossed on 11 and 12 May. Its end is taken to be 27 January 1945, when, after the capture of the last Japanese position, in the village of Pinghai near Mong Yu, the forces from Yunnan and from Burma joined hands on the Burma Road. The US official history (Romanus and Sunderland) states that General Wei formally brought the offensive to an end on 24 January, when Chiang Kai-shek ordered him to halt at the border and leave the clearing of the last stretch of road to the troops from India; the first patrols of the two forces had already made contact on 20 January near Wanding (Wanting). The ceremonial meeting took place on 28 January at Mong Yu and Muse.

Background

At the beginning of May 1942, towards the end of the Japanese conquest of Burma, the Japanese 56th Division drove along the Burma Road into China. It took Longling on 4 May and Tengchong on 10 May, and its spearhead reached the Salween, where the Chinese blew up the Huitong bridge and stopped it on the east bank. For the next two years the front stood on the river: the Japanese held the strip of western Yunnan between the Salween and the Burmese border, the Chinese the east bank, centred on Baoshan. The Burma Road, China’s last land link with the outside world, was cut, and American aid could arrive only by air over the Himalayas.

From 1942 General Joseph Stilwell, Chiang’s chief of staff and commander of the American forces in China, Burma and India, had been developing a plan to recover northern Burma with two Chinese forces. The first, “X Force” – divisions formed from soldiers who had withdrawn to India in 1942, trained and armed by the Americans at Ramgarh – was to advance from Assam along the Ledo Road, then under construction. The second, “Y Force” – the armies in Yunnan – was to cross the Salween and come to meet it. From April 1943 American instructors and liaison officers worked with the Chinese divisions in Yunnan, and thousands of Chinese officers passed through training centres near Kunming.

Chiang Kai-shek long held back. He believed that without a simultaneous large British operation in Burma and a landing in the Bay of Bengal an offensive from Yunnan would end in disaster, and that he would need his best troops in China. Disputes over this were one of the sources of his conflict with Stilwell. When “X Force” advanced into the Hukawng Valley in October 1943, the armies in Yunnan stayed where they were.

In the spring of 1944 the Americans lost patience. On 3 April President Franklin Delano Roosevelt sent Chiang a cable (delivered on 4 April) in which he declared it “inconceivable” that an army trained and equipped by the Americans should not help in Burma. A few days later General George Marshall directed that, if the inactivity continued, Lend-Lease deliveries to “Y Force” should be stopped; Stilwell’s deputy in Chongqing, General Thomas Hearn, announced that the April cargo allocation would be handed over to the air force. Under this pressure the Chinese National Military Council agreed to the offensive. According to the account of Brigadier General Frank Dorn, chief of staff of the American mission with “Y Force”, the Minister of War, He Yingqin, before affixing his seal, demanded Dorn’s personal guarantee that the Americans would get 50,000 men across the river, provide air support, direct the artillery and share responsibility for supply; Dorn suspected that the minister was counting on a refusal. Dorn agreed. On 14 April He Yingqin assured Marshall that the decision had been taken “on Chinese initiative, without outside pressure”.

The moment was dramatic for another reason too. On 17 April the Japanese launched Operation Ichi-Go in central China, the largest offensive in the history of their army. Chiang now had to fight on two fronts at once – and the Salween offensive took away his best-equipped divisions.

Forces and plan

General Wei Lihuang’s Chinese Expeditionary Force consisted of two army groups. The 11th Army Group of General Song Xilian (the 2nd, 6th and 71st Armies) faced the Burma Road and the ground south of it; the 20th Army Group of General Huo Kuizhang (the 53rd and 54th Armies) stood north of the road. Together they numbered twelve divisions, but the Ministry of War had not brought them up to strength: according to the US official history, at the start of the offensive Wei had about 72,000 men, 40 per cent fewer than the establishment provided for. The Americans supplied each army with sub-machine guns, mortars, anti-tank rifles and 75 mm mountain guns, and over the whole campaign handed over to “Y Force” 244 mountain howitzers and 189 anti-tank guns. General Dorn’s American operations staff with “Y Force” (Y-FOS) sent liaison teams of anything from a few to twenty men – infantrymen, gunners, engineers, signallers, doctors and veterinarians – to the regiments. The Americans had no power of command; they could only advise, organise supply and call in aircraft. Air support came from the Fourteenth Air Force of General Claire Chennault.

Facing them was the Japanese 56th Division under General Yūzō Matsuyama, a veteran of the 1942 campaign, recruited mainly in Fukuoka Prefecture and known as the “Dragon Division” (Tatsu). From April 1944 it came under the newly formed 33rd Army of General Masaki Honda. The division was holding a front more than 160 kilometres long. The Americans estimated that at the start of the campaign the Japanese had about 11,000 men and 36 guns on the Salween. Divisional headquarters was at Mangshi on the Burma Road. The key points were the town of Tengchong, enclosed by thick walls and held by Colonel Kurashige’s 148th Regiment; fortified Longling, from which routes ran north and south; and the many-peaked mountain of Song Shan, which commanded the site of the destroyed Huitong bridge and the first few dozen kilometres of road west of the river. It was held by a detachment of the 113th Regiment with a battalion of mountain artillery. Over two years the Japanese had turned it into a system of bunkers and tunnels.

The terrain was exceptional. Here the Salween runs through a gorge cut into a plateau some 2,700 metres high; the river is little more than 60 metres wide, but fast, deep and icy, and in the rainy season becomes a raging torrent. Beyond it lie the Gaoligong Mountains, with passes at around 3,000 metres, and beyond them the valley of the Shweli. Wei Lihuang’s plan provided for crossings on the flanks first. The 20th Army Group was to cross the Mamian and Datangzi passes in the Gaoligong Mountains, descend into the Shweli valley and advance on Tengchong. Part of the 11th Army Group was to cross in the south, near Pingka. Only when the envelopment was close to being completed were the main forces to strike along the Burma Road itself. The Americans advised otherwise: to break the army up into light, self-contained teams, to infiltrate through the gaps in the overstretched Japanese front and to bypass fortified points rather than storm them one after another.

The crossing and the fighting in the mountains (May–June 1944)

Chiang approved the date of the attack at the end of April, demanding success of his commanders “or else…”. On 9 May Dorn reported to Stilwell that the crossings would take place on the night of 10–11 May and that the Chinese were hoping to reach Myitkyina before him. The crossing, which the Chinese had feared most of all, went smoothly. The Japanese, who knew from intercepted signals that an attack was imminent, did not defend the bank – they had placed their main line of resistance on the mountain crest more than ten kilometres to the west. On the night of 10–11 May a combat group of the 115th Regiment of the New 39th Division, which was to cover the area of the Huiren bridge, crossed the river. On the night of 11–12 May engineers supervised by American soldiers ferried the 198th Division across below the Mamian pass in rubber boats and on rafts made of bamboo and oil drums; the current was so strong that four oarsmen could carry only four infantrymen at a time. On 11 and 12 May the 36th Division, with a regiment of the 116th Division, crossed near Mengka, and in the south, near Pingka, combat groups of the 2nd and 71st Armies.

The fighting began only in the mountains. On 12 May the 198th Division attacked the first Japanese outposts on the Mamian pass; in the night the Japanese counter-attacked and almost destroyed a Chinese battalion. Its commander was killed, as was Second Lieutenant Kirk Schaible, the first American liaison officer to fall in the campaign. The battles for the Mamian and Datangzi passes went on until mid-June. The Chinese attacked frontally, climbing into the crossfire of machine guns. “As a display of sheer courage the attacks were magnificent, but appallingly wasteful,” one American wrote; platoon commanders died a metre or two from the Japanese loopholes. Monsoon downpours flooded the paths, and supplies had to be dropped from aircraft or carried across a footbridge over the Salween that was completed only at the end of May. The Japanese, though few in number, defended themselves with great mobility, shifting battalions to wherever a breakthrough threatened.

At the end of May Wei Lihuang concluded that Matsuyama had moved troops from the south to the north against the 20th Army Group, and he threw the rest of the 71st Army across the river to strike straight at Longling. At the beginning of June the New 28th Division pushed the Japanese outposts back into the fortress on Song Shan and began to surround it, while the 87th and 88th Divisions reached Longling; on 8 June they broke through the outer defences of the town, which had only a weak garrison. Several days of uncoordinated assaults without artillery support achieved nothing, however. Matsuyama gathered several battalions from Tengchong and other sectors and from 14 June struck the Chinese flank at the Manlao bridge. According to the Americans, some 1,500 Japanese drove a force of 10,000 men back from Longling; of the 21 battalions of the 11th Army Group only nine took part in the fighting, one regiment fled, and the commander of the 87th Division tried to commit suicide. Chiang was furious and demanded that Wei name the incompetent commanders.

The chance of a quick breakthrough was gone. The Chinese settled down to long sieges of the Japanese strongpoints, while ever worse news came from Hunan, where the Ichi-Go offensive was under way.

Song Shan (June – 7 September 1944)

Song Shan (literally “Pine Mountain”) is a triangular massif rising some 900 metres above the Salween gorge, around which the Burma Road winds. From its summits Japanese artillery commanded about 58 kilometres of the road and the spot where the bridge had to be rebuilt. As long as Song Shan was in Japanese hands, the Chinese at Longling had to be supplied from the air. The garrison was commanded by Major Keijirō Kanemitsu; according to the US official history it numbered about 1,200 men, some 900 of them fit to fight, while Japanese sources speak of about 1,300, including the wounded.

From the end of June the mountain was assaulted by the 8th Army, brought in from the border of Indochina, with the elite Honour 1st Division. The first attacks, made by a regiment or two, broke down under fire from concealed bunkers; the Japanese let the Chinese take a summit and then showered it with grenades and mortar bombs from neighbouring positions. Only when the Chinese brought howitzers up to fire over open sights from a few kilometres away, and on 3 August used flamethrowers, did they begin to make progress. The Japanese replied with night sorties, in which they destroyed guns and captured weapons and ammunition.

Siegecraft decided the issue. From 11 August, with the help of American engineers, the Chinese dug tunnels under the key Japanese bunkers on the summit. On the morning of 20 August they detonated two mines containing about 2.7 tonnes of TNT in all; in one of the bunkers 42 Japanese were buried, five of whom were dug out alive. The summit was taken, though the Japanese in scattered pockets of resistance were still counter-attacking on 21 and 22 August. On 18 August the Americans and Chinese completed a new bridge over the Salween. Major Kanemitsu was killed on 6 September, and on 7 September the last officers burned the regimental colour and the last positions fell. According to the US official history, of the 1,200 defenders nine were taken prisoner and ten managed to escape; a few had been sent by the commander with a report to army headquarters before the end. It cost the Chinese 7,675 killed, about 5,000 of them from the 8th Army. On 9 September Chiang Kai-shek, to shame his own commanders, held up the defenders of Song Shan and the Japanese garrison of Myitkyina to them as an example in an order of the day.

On Song Shan, as at Tengchong, the Japanese army kept so-called “comfort women” – women, most of them Korean, forced into prostitution in military brothels; according to Japanese sources the station on the mountain was set up at the beginning of 1944. Some of them died in the last days of the siege – from shellfire or, as the Japanese historian Toyomi Asano established from participants’ accounts, at the hands of Japanese soldiers. Several Korean women were taken prisoner; at the beginning of September 1944 they were photographed and filmed by an American army cameraman, and one of them, Park Young-shim, recognised herself in the photograph years later and gave testimony. The freed women were held in a camp near Kunming and then returned to Korea by way of Chongqing.

Tengchong (27 June – 14 September 1944)

Tengchong (Tengyue), an old trading town of some 20,000 inhabitants enclosed by a high stone wall, was the last large centre on the Chinese side of the border and the starting point of the route to Myitkyina. When the 20th Army Group came down from the mountains at the end of June, its five divisions surrounded the town. The garrison was commanded by Colonel Kurashige; according to Japanese figures he had about 2,000 men, several hundred of them on Laifeng Shan, a mountain that commanded the town and its walls from the south. According to the same sources, the Chinese concentrated almost 50,000 men at Tengchong.

The air force tried first. On 26 June B-25 bombers attacked the walls, but bombs dropped from medium altitude reduced the residential quarters to rubble without harming the Japanese in their shelters; so the airmen switched to low-level attacks aimed directly at the wall. The infantry moved off on 2 July in monsoon rain, and by the end of the first week of July the town was surrounded. In the second half of July the Chinese discovered that the Japanese fortifications on Laifeng Shan faced the town and that the rear slope was almost undefended. After a heavy air raid on 26 July they took the mountain, and on 27 July Kurashige withdrew the garrison behind the walls.

Then came the fighting for every stretch of wall and every street. The air force blasted breaches, the Chinese forced their way in, and the defenders drove them out again in night counter-attacks. On 13 August a bomb hit a shelter, killing Colonel Kurashige together with several dozen officers and men; command passed to the 28-year-old Captain Ōta. From 21 August Allied transport aircraft were already landing at the captured airfield outside the town. Japanese fighters dropped a few hundred grenades to the defenders, but that was all their command could do for them. On 11 September the defenders burned their colour, and on 13 September the last few dozen men went into an attack in which almost all of them were killed. On 14 September General Huo Kuizhang reported to Wei Lihuang that the town had been taken. Tengchong lay in ruins.

There were also Korean and Japanese women from military brothels in Tengchong. On 15 September 1944 an American army cameraman filmed the bodies of murdered women outside the town; under the date 14 September the Allied operations journal recorded: “On the night of the 13th the Japanese shot 30 Korean girls in the city.” The film, found in American archives, was published in 2018 by researchers from Seoul National University and the Seoul city authorities.

The Japanese counter-offensive and Longling (July – 3 November 1944)

After the defeat at Imphal, the Japanese command in Burma decided that its most important task was to cut the land route from India to China. At the beginning of July Colonel Masanobu Tsuji joined the staff of the 33rd Army and drew up Operation Dan (Dan sakusen): a counter-stroke in Yunnan that was to relieve the garrisons of Song Shan and Tengchong and cut the Burma Road once again. The 56th Division was reinforced by the weakened 2nd Division, brought up from the Burmese coast, and by a regiment of the 49th Division. Preparations dragged on into September, however; the attack opened near Longling at the beginning of that month, when Song Shan was already falling and Tengchong was on the verge of collapse. The Japanese drove some of the Chinese troops off the hills around Longling and inflicted heavy losses on them, but after both garrisons had fallen General Honda called off the attack. In September the 56th Division still managed to extricate the Pingka garrison from encirclement.

The counter-offensive shook Chiang. On 15 September, when Stilwell returned from Guangxi with the news that Tengchong had been taken, the Generalissimo threatened that unless the troops at Myitkyina advanced on Bhamo within a week, he would withdraw “Y Force” behind the Salween to cover Kunming. Stilwell was “appalled”: the army, whose combat strength had fallen to about 14,000 men, was receiving no replacements. This dispute became one of the direct causes of the acute crisis in Sino-American relations that ended in October 1944 with Stilwell’s recall from China.

In the autumn the Chinese brought their divisions back up to strength and received reinforcements, among them the experienced 200th Division, a veteran of the 1942 campaign. On 29 October the 11th Army Group, supported by P-40 fighters of the Fourteenth Air Force and by artillery fire, advanced on Longling, outflanking the town from the south and west. The Japanese, who had already decided to confine themselves to delaying actions, withdrew; on the evening of 3 November the Honour 1st Division entered the ruined centre of the town.

From Mangshi to Wanding (November 1944 – January 1945)

After taking Longling the Chinese halted, which worried General Dorn. At his request General Albert Wedemeyer, Stilwell’s successor in China, intervened with Chiang, who on 9 November issued the order to advance further. The 56th Division was forbidden to accept a decisive battle: it blew up bridges, burned the rice harvest and fell back, fighting with rearguards. On 20 November the Chinese entered Mangshi, the former headquarters of the 56th Division, where the quickly repaired airfield allowed transports to land. Zhefang fell on 1 December. Wei Lihuang had at last found an effective way of fighting: one army advanced along each ridge parallel to the road and the rest along the road itself, so that every Japanese roadblock was outflanked on both sides.

The Chinese halted for a month in front of Wanding, the last town on the Chinese side of the border, and Wedemeyer threatened to withdraw air support from divisions that would not go forward. The advance was resumed at the turn of December and January. On 3 January 1945 the Chinese 9th Division broke into Wanding, but the Japanese threw it out in a night counter-attack; an attempt to cross the Shweli on the other flank also failed. Meanwhile the troops from India were approaching from the west, and the American Mars Task Force was threatening the road in the rear of the 56th Division. On 19 January, in an attack carefully co-ordinated with aircraft and artillery, the Chinese took Huilong Shan, the mountain above the town, and on 20 January their patrols found Wanding abandoned. From 23 January the Japanese withdrew the 56th Division south towards Lashio. On 27 January tanks and infantry of the Chinese New 1st Army under General Sun Liren occupied without a fight the village of Pinghai, the last Japanese position on the road, and the two Chinese armies linked up.

Losses

The figures for losses are incomplete and contradictory. According to the US official history, Song Shan alone cost the Chinese 7,675 killed. Japanese studies state that the Expeditionary Force, which at its peak numbered about 212,000 men, lost some 63,000 killed and wounded in the campaign, and that several divisions were so badly mauled that they ceased to be fit for combat. Chinese figures for the whole “battle of northern Burma and western Yunnan”, including the fighting of the army from India, give 31,443 killed and 35,948 wounded. American field hospitals admitted 9,428 wounded and sick Chinese between May and November 1944, of whom 492 died – but many of the wounded never reached them. At the end of 1944, according to the Americans, Wei Lihuang’s divisions were about 170,000 men short of full strength; replacements arrived very late.

On the Japanese side, according to the Japanese official history, the 56th Division and the units under its command lost about 8,000 of their 11,000 men in the first two months of fighting, of whom 1,719 were killed, 1,257 wounded and about 4,500 sick. The garrisons of Song Shan (about 1,300 men) and Tengchong (about 2,000) perished almost to a man. For the autumn fighting, according to the Americans, the Japanese sent in about 9,000 more men from the 2nd and 49th Divisions. The losses among the civilian population of western Yunnan, whose towns and villages – Tengchong and Longling among them – were destroyed, are not known precisely.

Significance

The Salween offensive was the most important victory won by Chiang Kai-shek’s army in the last year of the war and – as the US official history observed – the first case in the history of Sino-Japanese relations in which the Chinese drove the Japanese out of an area they wished to hold. Some 62,000 square kilometres of Chinese territory were recovered. The campaign showed that Chinese divisions equipped with artillery and heavy weapons and supported from the air could defeat the army of one of the great powers – though only with a numerical superiority of the order of five to one and at the cost of enormous losses. American liaison officers faulted the Chinese commanders for storming every strongpoint instead of bypassing it, for poor co-operation between infantry and artillery and for a lack of fire discipline; in their view none of these failings was beyond remedy.

The campaign was fought in the shadow of the Japanese defeat at Imphal and Kohima and of the capture of Myitkyina by Stilwell’s troops, and at the same time in the shadow of the disaster that Operation Ichi-Go was for China. For Chiang it meant tying down his best divisions far from the threatened centres of central and southern China; for the Americans it was a test of whether military aid could turn the Chinese army into an effective force. Disputes over its conduct contributed to Stilwell’s recall in October 1944; it was his successor, General Wedemeyer, who saw its final success.

The link-up of the forces from Yunnan and from India opened the land route to China. The first truck convoy left Ledo on 12 January 1945, moved on along the Burma Road after the ceremony at Mong Yu and Muse on 28 January, and drove into Kunming on 4 February. Chiang Kai-shek named the new route the Stilwell Road. Its importance, however, was smaller than had been expected: far more cargo was already being flown over the Himalayas than the trucks could carry, and the war ended a few months later. The more important consequence was that the American-trained divisions were freed to fight in China.

The campaign also left some of the few surviving wartime records of the fate of the “comfort women” – photographs and film from Song Shan and Tengchong which in the twenty-first century became important evidence in the dispute over Japan’s responsibility for the system of forced prostitution in its army. In China the fighting on the Salween remains a symbol of the self-sacrifice of the soldiers from Yunnan; in 1945 a cemetery for the fallen of the Chinese Expeditionary Force was founded at Tengchong.