The Changjiao massacre

Before dawn on 9 May 1943 Japanese infantry units landed at Changjiao (厂窖), a small place among the canals and dykes on the northern shore of Lake Dongting in Hunan province (today in Nan County, within the municipality of Yiyang). Over the following days, until 12 May, Japanese soldiers killed the people gathered there: local peasants and fishermen, refugees from neighbouring counties, and stranded Chinese soldiers who had not managed to cross to the south. Chinese figures speak of some 30,000 killed. In China the Changjiao massacre is regarded as the Japanese army’s greatest atrocity of the war after the Nanjing Massacre. The often encountered description “a three-day slaughter” is inaccurate: Chinese and Japanese sources give the dates as 9 to 12 May, that is, four days.

The offensive on the Yangtze

The massacre was part of a larger operation. In the spring of 1943 the Japanese 11th Army under Lieutenant General Isamu Yokoyama, subordinate to General Shunroku Hata’s China Expeditionary Army, carried out an operation in western Hubei and northern Hunan which the Japanese called the “operation of annihilation south of the river” (Kōnan senmetsu sakusen) and the Chinese the Battle of West Hubei. Its aim was to destroy the Chinese forces on the south bank of the Yangtze, stabilise the occupied area and open the river to several dozen ships that had lain idle near Yichang for years; along the way the Japanese seized rice from the rich country around Lake Dongting, one of China’s most important granaries.

The operation unfolded in three phases. In April the Japanese occupied the northern shore of Lake Dongting, and from 5 May they pushed on, encircling the Chinese units by the lake. According to Chinese research, the ring at Changjiao was closed by units of the Japanese 40th and 34th Divisions and the 17th Independent Mixed Brigade, supported by river patrol boats and aircraft. The area, surrounded by water on three sides, became a trap. Sheltering there, in the hope of crossing towards Changde, were soldiers of the Chinese 73rd Army, who had withdrawn without much of a fight, and thousands of refugees from the counties around the lake.

Four days of murder

What is known of the course of the atrocity comes above all from the accounts of survivors, collected by Chinese journalists in 1943 and by local authorities in the post-war years. According to these accounts, the Japanese, after taking one dyke and settlement after another, killed people indiscriminately: they machine-gunned them, murdered them with bayonets and swords, and drowned them in the canals, tied together in groups of several dozen. In one place, later called the “pit of a thousand people”, survivors buried more than a thousand victims. By the river, where several thousand soldiers and civilians had crowded together, an air raid preceded an attack from several directions. A Chinese correspondent who reached Changjiao after the battle wrote that the bodies in the river made it impossible to get through by boat.

The killings were accompanied by sexual violence – Chinese figures speak of more than two thousand women raped – and by looting and destruction. According to the same records, the Japanese burned more than three thousand houses and about 2,500 boats, breached the flood embankments in many places and destroyed the grain they could not carry off. For a population living from fishing and from growing rice on the polders, this meant losing everything.

How many victims

The figure of 30,000 killed comes from an investigation conducted in 1972 by county and local authorities in the People’s Republic of China. It breaks the victims down into some 7,000 inhabitants of Changjiao, more than 12,000 refugees, more than 5,000 officers and men of the National Revolutionary Army and more than 6,000 people killed in neighbouring localities. This figure appears on the memorial to the victims erected in 1986. The Japanese summary of the results of the whole operation speaks of 30,766 “abandoned bodies” of Chinese soldiers across the entire area of the fighting, without distinguishing how many of them died in combat and how many were murdered. Because no organised investigation was carried out for a long time after the massacre and the physical evidence was not secured, the exact number of victims cannot be established. What is certain is that it ran into many thousands of people, most of them civilians.

The rest of the operation

After the killings at Changjiao had ended, the Japanese continued their offensive. On 12 May units of the 13th Division crossed the Yangtze near Shashi and, together with other units, encircled the Chinese 87th Army, and from 18 May, in the third phase of the operation, they pressed upstream towards the Yangtze gorges. There, at the fortress of Shipai, which barred the route through the Three Gorges towards Chiang Kai-shek’s wartime capital at Chongqing, the commander of the Chinese 6th War Area, General Chen Cheng, ordered a defence at all costs. For the first time Chinese infantry was supported on a significant scale by American air power – General Claire Chennault’s Fourteenth Air Force. At the end of May the Japanese ships from Yichang sailed downriver to Wuhan, and on 29 May the 11th Army declared the operation’s objectives achieved and turned back to its former positions.

The government in Chongqing and the Western press proclaimed a great Chinese victory. American observers took a more sober view: according to the War Department, the Japanese had withdrawn because they had collected the rice and got their ships through, and the historian Barbara W. Tuchman wrote of an offensive that looked like a training and foraging exercise. According to Japanese figures, the 11th Army lost 771 killed and more than 2,700 wounded in the whole operation.

Memory

News of the massacre reached the Chinese press as early as June 1943; a newspaper published in Leiyang compared it to the Yangzhou massacre of 1645, one of the darkest memories in Chinese history. In August the inhabitants of Hanshou County asked the government in Chongqing for exemption from taxes and conscription and for relief. The Hunan provincial authorities granted some funds, but according to a report of 1947 the victims’ families received no compensation. Some Chinese historians also point to the responsibility of the Kuomintang military command, whose units by the lake withdrew without a fight, leaving the population and the broken units encircled.

Unlike the Nanjing Massacre, the atrocity at Changjiao has not been the subject of wider research outside China, and for a long time it remained almost unknown even in China itself. A memorial to the victims was erected in 1986 and a museum in 2008, and in 2013 the site of the massacre was added to China’s list of heritage sites of national importance.

Its place in the war

The Changjiao massacre shows what the war in China looked like in 1943, when the world’s attention was focused on Tunisia, the Atlantic and the Pacific. The Sino-Japanese front had long since ceased to produce decisive results: the Japanese, who since the Battle of Nanjing in 1937 had occupied eastern China, confined themselves to short offensives intended to break up Chinese forces, seize food and destroy bases, after which they returned to their starting positions. Each such expedition brought looting, destruction and mass killing to the civilian population – as had the Zhejiang–Jiangxi campaign, the reprisal for the Doolittle Raid, a year earlier.

A few months later, in November and December 1943, the Japanese struck from the same area at Changde itself; the Battle of Changde was one of the hardest-fought of the whole war and again cost the lives of many thousands of civilians. In 1944 the great Ichi-Go offensive swept through Hunan once more. Changjiao belongs to the long list of atrocities committed by an army that waged this war in the name of Emperor Hirohito – atrocities whose victims, for the most part, have never been accurately counted.