Chinese victory at Changsha

On 8 October 1939 the main forces of the Japanese 11th Army, covered by their own aircraft, crossed back to the northern bank of the Xinqiang River in the north of Hunan province. Three weeks earlier they had set out from here for Changsha, the provincial capital, and had reached its approaches, but had not taken the city. Following them across the river came the Chinese 195th Division, which reoccupied its former forward outposts, while at night Chinese units raided Japanese posts at Xitang and Yaolin. So ended the first battle of Changsha. The government of Chiang Kai-shek proclaimed a “great victory at Changsha” – the first time since the start of the war that a major Japanese offensive had ended with a return to the start line and an attacked provincial capital had remained in Chinese hands. The Japanese command replied that it had never intended to take the city.

Chronologies sum up the course of the battle in two entries. Under 1 October they state that the Chinese National Revolutionary Army launched a counter-offensive at Changsha aimed at the over-extended Japanese lines of communication. Under 8 October they write that the Chinese, in a great victory, inflicted heavy losses on the Japanese and forced them to retreat to Yueyang. Both statements need to be made more precise. Chinese units had been attacking the Japanese rear and supply columns since the end of September, and Xue Yue ordered a general counter-attack along the whole front on 3 October. 1 October, by contrast, was according to Chinese studies the day on which the commander of the Japanese 11th Army issued the order for a general withdrawal. Nor did the Japanese return to Yueyang itself, which they had held since November 1938 and which remained their base throughout, but to positions on the Xinqiang River, a few dozen kilometres south of the city, from which they had set out in September.

The Japanese at their goal and spent

The offensive, which began on 14 September in northern Jiangxi and from 18 September extended to northern Hunan, was meant to destroy the main forces of the Chinese 9th War Area within a few weeks. General Yasuji Okamura’s Japanese troops quickly broke through the first two Chinese lines of defence: the Xinqiang River and the Miluo River. After taking Fulinpu and Jinjing, the forward units of the 6th Division reached the Laodao River on 29 September, the last water line before Changsha. This was the furthest point of the advance.

It was at precisely this moment that the plan prepared since the spring by General Xue Yue, acting commander of the 9th War Area, came into play. The Chinese divisions did not defend any of the river lines to the last. After brief resistance they withdrew to the flanks, into the Mufu Shan mountains in the east and towards Lake Dongting in the west, letting the Japanese pass southwards. The villagers were evacuated, grain stocks were removed, and roads were dug up and turned into rice paddies. Japanese lorries and guns fell behind, supplies had to be carried on men’s backs, and more and more units had to guard the lengthening roads. The 33rd Division’s column, advancing through the mountains on Pingjiang, and the 3rd Division’s landing force on the lake became bogged down in fighting and could not help the 6th Division. The latter stood before Changsha alone, with ever more Chinese units on its flanks and in its rear. An American military observer described night battles in which the Japanese vanguard had tens of thousands of Chinese soldiers in front of it, behind it and on both sides.

The Chinese command argued until the last moment over whether to defend the city. Chiang Kai-shek preferred to give it up and save his troops, and around 29 September he sent Generals Chen Cheng and Bai Chongxi to the 9th War Area’s headquarters to persuade Xue Yue to withdraw. Xue refused, and Chen Cheng, seeing how exhausted the Japanese were, allowed him to act “as time and place require”. At the end of September the Chinese command agreed to give battle at Changsha. A second line of defence was prepared south of the city, and Xue assembled six divisions for a counter-stroke.

1 October: the order to withdraw

Okamura did not wait for this blow. With roads cut, meagre supplies dropped from aircraft and mounting losses, staying any longer before Changsha threatened his forward units with encirclement and destruction. According to Chinese studies, he issued the order for a general withdrawal on 1 October. Japanese sources present this decision as a “return to the original position” planned from the outset, in line with the operational guidelines of 15 August, which did indeed provide that after destroying the Chinese forces the 11th Army would return to its starting positions. The trouble was that the Chinese forces had not been destroyed.

On the same day, 1 October, Xue Yue was formally appointed commander of the 9th War Area, which he had led in an acting capacity since the beginning of the year. The Chinese air force and the Soviet volunteer airmen who had been fighting on China’s side since 1937 struck at the Japanese airfields at Hankou, from which aircraft flew in support of the offensive and to bomb Chongqing. Chinese studies associate these raids with 1 October; Japanese ones describe above all the raid of 3 October, when Soviet bombers, flying at high altitude, dropped their bombs on the airfield just as naval air officers had gathered in front of the command post. Several officers were killed, and the commander of the 1st Combined Air Group, Rear Admiral Nishizō Tsukahara, was badly wounded and lost an arm. It was the first blow of such severity suffered by Japanese aviation in China since the start of the war. Another raid on Hankou followed on 14 October.

Counter-attack and pursuit

When the Japanese 6th Division began falling back across the Laodao River, the commander of the Chinese 15th Army Group, General Guan Linzheng, sent the 52nd and 73rd Corps in pursuit, with orders to chase the Japanese as far as the Miluo River. On 3 October Xue Yue ordered a general counter-attack along the whole front in northern Hunan, from the Mufu Shan mountains to Lake Dongting. Chinese corps emerged from the mountains onto the flanks and rear of the retreating columns, cutting roads and attacking supply trains, while artillery brought up to the front shelled the lines of retreat. This was in essence the attack on “over-extended lines of communication” of which the chronologies write: not an assault on the head of the Japanese columns, but blows against their rear once they had already turned back.

According to Chinese accounts, on 5 October Chinese soldiers shot down a Japanese liaison aircraft on which Okamura’s order to break off the operation was found. That same day the Chinese 23rd Division attacked the anchorage of the Japanese river flotilla at Yingtian on Lake Dongting, where a Japanese landing force had come ashore in September, and damaged several vessels. On 6 October the Japanese abandoned Yingtian, and the Chinese recaptured Pingjiang. That day Okamura announced that the operation had achieved its objectives – that is, it had inflicted heavy losses on the 9th War Area – and that his troops were returning to their starting positions. The Japanese columns crossed north over the Miluo River, and on 8 October over the Xinqiang.

After 8 October

By 9 October the Chinese 195th Division had re-established the line of outposts from Lujiao on the lake through the small town of Xinqiang to Yanglinjie, the same as before the battle. Over the following days, in Jiangxi and Hubei, where the Japanese had also withdrawn to their starting positions, the Chinese troops returned to their former positions. Chinese communiqués stated that all lost territory had been recovered by 10 October, while Chinese studies speak of the full restoration of the pre-battle situation around 14 October.

Chinese propaganda presented the outcome as one of the greatest victories of the war. Communiqués spoke of more than 30,000, and in some versions more than 40,000, Japanese killed and wounded. The Japanese reported that they had lost 850 killed and 2,700 wounded, and had killed 44,000 Chinese soldiers and taken 4,000 prisoners. The truth lay somewhere in between. The Japanese figures were understated, as documents on replacements for the units involved in the operation show, and the Chinese ones clearly inflated. Western observers estimated the losses of both sides at several tens of thousands of men. Chinese losses were heavy too: according to a staff officer of the 9th War Area at the time, the eleven corps that had fought at Changsha afterwards received replacements amounting to forty regiments. Another staff officer recalled that when foreign correspondents came to the city and asked to be shown prisoners, it turned out there was not a single one.

The Chinese historian Zhang Xianwen later judged that, at the level of the battle itself, neither side had won: the initiative lay with the Japanese throughout, as they began the operation and broke it off themselves, and both armies returned to where they had started. On the scale of the war as a whole, however, the outcome favoured China. The Japanese had not destroyed the main forces of the 9th War Area, had suffered losses and had been forced to turn back, while the Chinese, prepared to lose the city, were entitled to count it a victory that the Japanese had not entered it. After the battle Okamura wrote to the commander of the China Expeditionary Army, General Toshizō Nishio, that breaking the enemy’s will to resist was “the most difficult of difficult things”, and that abandoning captured ground and returning to former positions “encourages the enemy to counter-attack and becomes material for his propaganda”.

Against the background of the war in Europe

The Chinese victory came at the moment when, in Europe, Poland had lost its war. On 6 October the last large grouping of the Polish Army surrendered at Kock, and Hitler offered peace in the Reichstag to the Western powers, which had withdrawn from the Saar and were waiting behind the Maginot Line. Japan, which after its defeat in the Battle of Khalkhin Gol and the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact had announced that it would not become involved in the war in Europe, hoped that it could now quickly bring the “China Incident” to an end. Changsha showed this to be an illusion. For China, which had been fighting alone for more than two years, the news from Changsha was a rare piece of good news, and Xue Yue became one of the most famous Chinese commanders.

Place in the war

Encouraged by the result, Chiang Kai-shek ordered preparations for the first offensive of the war on many fronts simultaneously. The Winter Offensive, conducted from December 1939 to the spring of 1940, did not, however, bring a breakthrough. Japan looked for other ways. In November 1939 its troops landed on the coast of Guangxi and took Nanning in order to cut China off from supplies via French Indochina, and in March 1940 the collaborationist government of Wang Jingwei was set up in Nanjing.

Changsha was fought over three more times. Xue Yue defended the city against a second attack in September and October 1941 (the second battle of Changsha) and against a third at the turn of 1941 and 1942. The city fell only in June 1944, during the great Japanese Operation Ichi-gō. The 1939 battle showed that the war in China had reached a stalemate: Japan could no longer carry out operations that brought lasting gains, and China could not drive it out of the territories it had occupied. Seeking a way out of this impasse, Japan turned towards the European colonies in South-East Asia, weakened by the war in Europe, which in December 1941 led it into war with the United States and Britain. The Sino-Japanese War then became part of the world war, and China formally declared war on Japan, Germany and Italy.