The bombing of Chongqing

At the end of May 1940, while the world’s attention was fixed on Flanders and Dunkirk, Japanese bombers came again and again over Chongqing, a city on the upper Yangtze that had been the seat of Chiang Kai-shek’s government for two years. On 18 May the air arms of the Imperial Navy and the Imperial Japanese Army launched a joint operation called “101” (百一号作戦). Throughout the summer, on every day of good weather, it was to destroy China’s wartime capital until the government and the inhabitants concluded that further resistance was pointless. The operation lasted until early September, while the bombing of Chongqing as a whole went on, with interruptions, until 1943 – or, according to Chinese records, until December 1944. It was one of the longest bombing campaigns against a single city in the entire war.

War chronologies record a heavy Japanese bombing of Chongqing on 31 May. The available records do not single out any one raid on that day. The last two weeks of May were simply the first phase of Operation 101, with raids on successive clear days and nights. The date of 31 May can therefore be treated as a notional close of its first stage.

A capital in the mountains

After the fall of Nanjing in December 1937 the government of the Republic of China announced that it was moving its seat to Chongqing in Sichuan. In practice the authorities first worked from Hankou, but after the lost Battle of Wuhan in the autumn of 1938 Chiang and his state apparatus withdrew into the interior. Chongqing stood on a rocky promontory at the confluence of the Yangtze and the Jialing, shielded to the east by the Yangtze gorges, through which the Japanese army could not break. Hundreds of thousands of refugees poured into the city, along with evacuated factories, universities and government offices. From a provincial river port it became the political and economic centre of Free China.

Japan lacked the strength to march deep into Sichuan. At the end of 1938 the General Staff concluded that stretching the land front any further was beyond the country’s means and would rob it of freedom of action against the USSR. On 2 December 1938 Imperial General Headquarters ordered the army air force, in cooperation with the navy, to “suppress and disrupt” the enemy’s political centre and to destroy the Chinese air force. The army’s first organised raid on Chongqing, on 26 December 1938, was lost in the clouds. The fog and low cloud that hang over Sichuan almost constantly from October to April proved to be the city’s best defence. Only the months from May to September were suitable for bombing.

The first great blow fell on 3 and 4 May 1939. Navy Mitsubishi G3M bombers flying from Hankou dropped high-explosive and incendiary bombs on the crowded city centre. The wooden buildings burned for two days. According to figures cited in Japanese historiography, around 670 people were killed on 3 May and 3,318 on 4 May; Chinese studies give a combined total of 3,991 dead for the two days. Some 200,000 people were left homeless. Missions, churches and embassies were also damaged. Later that year the raids were less frequent, as part of the Japanese air force was absorbed by the fighting against the Red Army at Khalkhin Gol.

Operation 101

In the spring of 1940 Japan was looking for a way to end a war that was now in its third year. In the winter the Chinese had shown, in their Winter Offensive, that their army could still attack. Japan’s political attempt was the creation in March of Wang Jingwei’s government in Nanjing, which was meant to deprive Chiang of the right to speak for China. Its military attempt was a land offensive in Hubei against the 5th War Zone of Li Zongren, known as the Battle of Zaoyang–Yichang, which began on 1 May. Its objective was Yichang, a port at the entrance to the Yangtze gorges and the closest point to Chongqing that the Japanese could reach. On 16 May General Zhang Zizhong, commander of the 33rd Army Group, was killed in this fighting – the highest-ranking Chinese commander to fall in the war. The third attempt was the air campaign itself.

The plan for Operation 101 was drawn up by the staff of the China Area Fleet, and its principal author was the fleet’s chief of staff, Shigeyoshi Inoue. On 13 May the army and the navy concluded an agreement on conducting the operation jointly. The navy committed two combined air groups, commanded by Rear Admirals Tamon Yamaguchi and Takijirō Ōnishi, with around 90 front-line G3M bombers (not counting reserves) operating from airfields around Hankou. The army sent the 3rd Air Group with Ki-21 heavy bombers, flying from Yuncheng in Shanxi. Japanese intelligence estimated Chinese strength in the whole of Sichuan and the north-west at several hundred aircraft, and in Chongqing itself at about thirty fighters.

The raids began on 18 May. According to Japanese figures, 178 people were killed and 408 wounded in Chongqing on the very first day. Until mid-June the targets were, at least nominally, airfields, barracks, government offices and industrial plants. The surroundings of the city were bombed too. On 27 May bombs fell on Beibei, where Fudan University had been operating since its evacuation from Shanghai. Among the dead was the economist Sun Hanbing, the university’s director of studies and dean of its law faculty, and publisher of a journal that had printed, among other things, a translation of extracts from Edgar Snow’s book on the Chinese Communists. Six of his colleagues and students were killed with him.

The Chinese air force defended the city as best it could. It flew mainly Soviet I-15bis (PL) and I-16 fighters, supplied under the 1937 agreement with the USSR, but they ran on poor fuel and were increasingly obsolete. On 20 May, over eastern Chongqing, pilots of the 4th Pursuit Group flying newer, cannon-armed I-16s shot down a reconnaissance aircraft and three bombers. The Japanese answered with tactics: reconnaissance aircraft watched from high altitude as the Chinese fighters took off, the bombers circled out of their reach, and struck when the fighters returned to refuel. All the while a Chinese network of observers, telephones and signal flags gave the city as much as an hour’s warning of a raid.

A city under the bombs

Chongqing’s real shield was its shelters. The city stood on sandstone, into which hundreds of public and private tunnels and caves had been cut since 1937. According to Chinese figures they could hold several hundred thousand people. When the alarm sounded, the inhabitants sat underground for hours, sometimes all night, in the stifling heat and darkness. The city lived to the rhythm of the alarms: shops, offices and schools moved their business to the early morning and the night, and after every raid volunteer teams fought the fires and dug through the ruins. The Japanese authorities called on the foreign legations to move to a designated safety zone on the south bank of the Yangtze. According to Japanese accounts, Chiang Kai-shek then moved his own residence close to that zone.

In June the operation intensified. On 10, 12 and 16 June, 129, 154 and 114 bombers respectively appeared over the city. From roughly mid-June the Japanese command, disappointed with the results of precision attacks, divided Chongqing into zones lettered A to E, starting from the eastern end of the city, and bombed each of them in turn in its entirety, mainly with incendiaries. Japanese reports still listed airfields and factories, but in practice this was carpet bombing of whole districts. Much of old Chongqing burned down. Yichang also fell on 12 June, giving the Japanese a foothold several hundred kilometres closer to Chongqing.

Operation 101 ended in early September. According to Japanese records, the whole operation – which besides Chongqing also covered Chengdu and other cities in the hinterland – dropped 27,107 bombs with a total weight of 2,957 tonnes. The navy flew raids on 50 days, the army on 21. The Japanese claimed to have shot down 117 Chinese aircraft; the Chinese said they had shot down 16 Japanese. A few days later, on 13 September, the navy’s new Mitsubishi A6M Zero fighter made its debut over Chongqing. Thirteen Zeros attacked 34 Chinese aircraft. The Chinese lost a dozen or more fighters, shot down or damaged, and ten pilots; the Japanese lost none. From then on the Chinese air force avoided combat and, when the alarm sounded, hid its aircraft at distant airfields.

What each side wanted

The Japanese hoped that the bombing would paralyse the work of the government, destroy the industrial base and, above all, break the spirit of the population, who would then demand that Chiang end the war. This went on at the same time as secret peace talks that Japanese intelligence was conducting in Hong Kong with supposed emissaries from Chongqing: the bombs were meant to strengthen Japan’s hand. The Japanese army air force’s 1937 regulations in any case permitted “political bombing”, that is, attacks on the population intended to intimidate the enemy.

The Chinese government did not give way. It turned the bombed city into a symbol. On 6 September 1940 Chongqing was officially given the title of “auxiliary capital” (陪都). The daily raids became proof of Chinese endurance for the foreign journalists who lived and wrote in Chongqing. The American reporter Theodore H. White and the photographers of Life magazine showed readers in the United States burning districts and crowds in the shelters. As early as July 1938, after the raids on Canton, the US government had announced a “moral embargo” on the sale of aircraft to states that bombed civilians. The bombing of Chongqing strengthened the conviction in Washington that Japan had to be resisted, including through economic sanctions.

Its place in the war

In 1941 the Japanese conducted a further campaign, Operation 102. On 5 June 1941, during a three-hour night raid, disaster struck in the largest public tunnel shelter in the city centre, into which far more people had crowded than it could hold. The entrances were closed, the air ran out and panic broke out. The official inquiry established 992 dead; local chronicles speak of two to three thousand, and contemporary press reports, including Life, of around four thousand. Since 1998 the air-raid sirens have sounded in Chongqing every year on 5 June. On 3 September 1941 General Saburō Endō, commander of the army’s 3rd Air Brigade, submitted a memorandum to his superiors on “the futility of bombing Chongqing”: a new city was rising in place of the burned-out old one, and the government carried on working. After the outbreak of the Pacific War Japan needed its aircraft elsewhere, and the raids on Chongqing became sporadic.

The toll of the campaign is calculated in different ways. According to Chinese figures, between February 1938 and August 1943 more than 9,500 aircraft flew over Chongqing and its surroundings in more than two hundred raids. 11,889 people were killed and 14,100 wounded. Other estimates speak of anywhere from over ten thousand to more than twenty thousand dead. None of this broke China’s resistance. Chiang’s government remained in Chongqing until the end of the war, and the city became one of the capitals of the anti-Hitler coalition.

Chongqing was one of the first cities to endure years of planned, repeated bombing intended to break a nation’s will. Before it came Guernica, Warsaw and – four days before Operation 101 began – Rotterdam. After it came London, Coventry and, in the end, the cities of Germany, against which the British bombing offensive began on the night of 15–16 May 1940, and those of Japan. According to many accounts, the people of Chongqing who read about the raids on London in the summer of 1940 felt that they shared the fate of the British. The Japanese journalist and researcher Tetsuo Maeda argues that Japan itself set an example in China which later weakened American scruples about burning Japanese cities in 1944–1945. In 2006 survivors of the Chongqing raids and their families sued the Japanese government. In 2015 the Tokyo High Court acknowledged that they had suffered harm but refused them compensation.