The fall of Xuzhou

On 19 May 1938 soldiers of the Japanese 65th Infantry Regiment of the 13th Division and the tanks of Colonel Iwanaka’s detachment entered Xuzhou, a city at the crossing of the two most important railway lines in eastern China. They met almost no resistance. The city was largely destroyed by bombing and deserted, and the armies of the Chinese 5th War Zone, which had been defending the Xuzhou area since February, had slipped out of the ring closing around them in the preceding days. That same day Japanese Imperial General Headquarters announced the capture of the city. Japan had won a territorial victory but had not achieved what it was after: the great battle of encirclement that was to destroy the main Chinese forces and end the war never took place.

Some chronologies state that Xuzhou fell on “1 May”. This is a mistake. At the beginning of May the fighting on the approaches to the city was only just gathering pace, and the Japanese divisions launched their decisive attack between 5 and 7 May. Japanese, Chinese and Western sources all agree that the Japanese entered Xuzhou on 19 May and that the Chinese withdrawal was completed around 21 May.

After Taierzhuang

The defeat at Taierzhuang at the beginning of April humiliated the Japanese army. Earlier, the General Staff in Tokyo had wanted to limit operations in China for most of 1938 and rebuild its forces, but after the setback the voices calling for the Chinese to be punished, and for advantage to be taken of the concentration of their main forces around Xuzhou, prevailed. On 7 April Imperial General Headquarters ordered the North China Area Army under General Hisaichi Terauchi and the Central China Expeditionary Army under General Shunroku Hata to destroy the enemy in the Xuzhou area. The policy of “non-expansion” of the conflict, which Tokyo had still been proclaiming in February, was abandoned after less than two months.

The Chinese, meanwhile, encouraged by their victory, had drawn more armies to Xuzhou. According to Japanese estimates, by May Li Zongren had some 600,000 soldiers under his command, though many divisions were under strength and poorly armed, and their commanders came from different provincial armies that often distrusted one another. The Japanese were roughly a third as numerous, but they had the advantage in artillery, tanks and aircraft and, above all, in mobility.

The pincers

The Japanese plan was to trap the Chinese forces in a great ring. From the north-east the 5th and 10th Divisions – the same ones that had been beaten at Taierzhuang – were to pin the Chinese down. West of Lake Weishan the 14th and 16th Divisions were to attack from the north, and from the south, from the Huai River, the 9th and 13th Divisions, later joined by the 3rd. The ring was to close west of Xuzhou, on the Longhai railway, along which the Chinese could withdraw into the interior.

In late April and the first half of May the fighting north and east of the city was bloody for both sides. Detachments of General Seishirō Itagaki’s 5th Division were surrounded for more than a week and broke out only with the help of reinforcements. An army from Yunnan defended Mount Yuwang for nearly a month and lost more than half its men. On 7 May the commander of the Japanese 2nd Army, Prince Naruhiko Higashikuni, a member of the imperial family, gave the order to attack. From the south Hata’s divisions advanced faster than expected. On 12 May Iwanaka’s armoured detachment took Yongcheng, and on 14 May it blew up a bridge on the Longhai railway west of Xuzhou. The next day a unit of the 16th Division carried out similar demolitions. The main line of retreat to the west had been cut.

The retreat

Li Zongren realised that Xuzhou could not be held. With Chiang Kai-shek’s consent the order to withdraw was issued on 15 and 16 May. Li divided his forces into five groups, assigned each a line of march and an assembly area, and ordered General Zhang Zizhong’s 59th Army to cover the city. The main Chinese forces did not take the roads where the Japanese were waiting. Broken up into smaller units, they marched by night and hid by day in fields of ripening wheat. Most went first south and south-west, passed between the Japanese columns and only then turned west towards the Dabie Mountains. On 18 May a sandstorm and fog hampered Japanese aerial observation. Bai Chongxi and Tang Enbo led some of the troops, and Li Zongren’s headquarters left Xuzhou at the last moment.

The Japanese divisions converged on Xuzhou, but the ring was empty. The 13th Division, which had pushed forward faster than the others, took Bawangshan hill west of the city on 17 May; on 18 May the 3rd Division attacked Suxian to the south; and on 19 May soldiers of the 13th Division and Iwanaka’s tanks entered Xuzhou. On 20 May the Japanese navy occupied the port of Lianyungang at the eastern end of the Longhai railway, and on 25 May Terauchi and Hata made a ceremonial entry into the city. The Japanese command later blamed the 13th Division for wrecking the encirclement plan with an over-hasty advance, but the real reason was that forces a third as numerous could not seal off a far larger enemy over vast, flat terrain. According to various estimates, between 200,000 and 300,000 Chinese soldiers escaped the encirclement, and a few months later they were defending Wuhan. Western historians regard the retreat as one of the most skilful manoeuvres of the Chinese army in the entire war.

Casualties and destruction

The losses on both sides over the whole campaign are hard to establish. Official Japanese tallies record 2,130 killed and some 8,600 wounded for the period from February to May 1938. At the end of June a commemoration in Xuzhou honoured 7,452 fallen soldiers of the 2nd Army alone, which shows that the partial tallies understated the losses. The Japanese reckoned that they had destroyed about a tenth of the Chinese forces, that is, several tens of thousands of men. No reliable Chinese figures exist.

The civilian population suffered most. Xuzhou had been bombed since August 1937. On 14 May 1938 a single air raid reportedly killed around 700 people. Canadian Jesuits who had stayed in the city wrote that more than a third of the houses lay in ruins and most of the inhabitants had fled. The missionaries also reported killings of civilians by Japanese soldiers in the villages around the city. In Japan the campaign became the backdrop to one of the most popular war books, Wheat and Soldiers by Ashihei Hino, the diary of an infantryman who marched on Xuzhou through the wheatfields.

Significance

The capture of Xuzhou linked the Japanese territories in North China and on the lower Yangtze and opened the way west, along the Longhai railway, towards Zhengzhou and on to Wuhan, the temporary seat of the Chinese government. At the beginning of June the Japanese took Kaifeng. To stop them, Chiang Kai-shek agreed to breach the dykes of the Yellow River. On 9 June Chinese soldiers broke through the embankment at Huayuankou. The flood inundated vast areas of three provinces and halted the Japanese advance for several months, but, according to various estimates, it killed anywhere from several hundred thousand to almost a million people and drove millions from their homes. It remains one of the most contested decisions of the war.

Instead of a decisive victory, Japan had gained another city and a longer front line. On 15 June, at a conference in the presence of Emperor Hirohito, it was decided to take Wuhan and Canton (Guangzhou). Both cities fell in October 1938, and the Chinese government moved to Chongqing, beyond the reach of the Japanese armies. The war that Tokyo had hoped to end with one great battle at Xuzhou turned into a years-long stalemate in which more than a million Japanese soldiers were tied down in China. Seeking a way out of it, Japan turned towards the European colonies in South-East Asia, which in December 1941 led it into war with the United States and Britain.