The Hundred Regiments Offensive

At eight in the evening on 20 August 1940 units of the communist Eighth Route Army simultaneously attacked Japanese posts, stations, bridges and track across a vast area of northern China. The main target was the Zhengtai railway, which linked Shijiazhuang in Hebei with Taiyuan, the capital of Shanxi province. At the same time attacks were made on the Datong–Puzhou (Tongpu) railway in Shanxi, on the Beijing–Hankou line and on the roads between Japanese garrisons. The operation was directed from headquarters in the mountains of south-eastern Shanxi by the deputy commander of the Eighth Route Army, General Peng Dehuai. It was the largest offensive the Chinese communists carried out in the entire war against Japan. It went down in history under the name given to it after a few days’ fighting: the Great Battle of the Hundred Regiments (Baituan dazhan). In English it is usually known as the Hundred Regiments Offensive.

Communists behind Japanese lines

The Eighth Route Army was formed in August 1937 from the main forces of the Chinese Red Army, which under the Second United Front formally became part of the government army of Chiang Kai-shek. In September 1937 it was renamed the 18th Army Group, but the old name remained in general use. Its commander was Zhu De, his deputy was Peng Dehuai, and the army consisted of three divisions: the 115th, 120th and 129th. In the autumn of 1937 it fought in Shanxi alongside government troops in the Battle of Taiyuan, and then, in line with the policy of Mao Zedong, it moved behind Japanese lines. In the Taihang Mountains, around Mount Wutai and on the plains of Hebei the communists built bases and organised village administration, militia and guerrilla units. From a few tens of thousands of men in 1937 their forces grew to several hundred thousand. In December 1939 the Japanese North China Area Army estimated the regular communist forces at about 88,000 men. Two years later it raised that estimate to 140,000, and on top of the regular troops there was a large militia.

The Japanese, who in 1937–1938 had taken the cities, railways and main roads of northern China, set out from 1939 to stamp out the communist bases. Along the railways and roads they built a network of fortified posts and towers, dug ditches and put up walls, in order to chop the country into isolated pieces and gradually “mop them up”. The Chinese called this the “cage policy”: the railway was to be its pillar, the road its chain and the blockhouse its padlock. By Chinese reckoning, in 1939–1940 the Japanese carried out more than a hundred operations in northern China, each involving more than a thousand soldiers. The Japanese First Army of Lieutenant General Yoshio Shinozuka, which held Shanxi, was subordinate to Lieutenant General Hayao Tada’s North China Area Army. It had to scatter its divisions and independent mixed brigades among hundreds of posts, often manned by a platoon or less.

Why August 1940

The summer of 1940 was the darkest period of the war for China. In March the Japanese set up the collaborationist government of Wang Jingwei in Nanjing. In June they captured Yichang on the Yangtze, from where their air force bombed Chongqing. After the fall of France, Tokyo forced the closure of the Indochinese border to supplies for China, and on 18 July Britain closed the Burma Road for three months. In Chongqing voices in favour of peace with Japan grew louder, and the Japanese were holding secret talks with Chinese emissaries. The communists feared that Chiang Kai-shek would capitulate and wanted to show that China was still fighting. They were also tired of the charge in government newspapers that their army “roams but does not fight”. Relations with the Kuomintang were bad: in the winter of 1939–1940 there had been fighting in Shanxi with the troops of Yan Xishan, which broke out during the Chinese Winter Offensive, and in March 1940 the Eighth Route Army routed Zhu Huaibing’s government forces in the border area of Hebei, Henan and Shanxi.

Peng Dehuai had been planning a great blow against the railways as early as the spring of 1940, but at that time the party leadership in Yan’an ordered him to prepare for a clash with the Kuomintang. On 22 July Eighth Route Army headquarters at Zhuanbi, in Wuxiang county, issued a preparatory order signed by Zhu De, Peng and the deputy chief of staff, Zuo Quan. Zhu De himself was then in Yan’an, where he had returned in May after talks with the commander of the government’s 1st War Zone, so in practice Peng commanded the operation. The order called for a major operation to wreck the Zhengtai railway, “taking advantage of the tall sorghum and the rainy season”, with a force of at least 22 regiments. A copy was sent to Yan’an. The battle order of 8 August divided the tasks. The Shanxi–Chahar–Hebei Military District of General Nie Rongzhen was to destroy the eastern section of the line, from Shijiazhuang to Niangzi Pass. The 129th Division of Liu Bocheng, whose political commissar was Deng Xiaoping, was given the western section, as far as Yuci near Taiyuan. The 120th Division of He Long was to cut the northern part of the Tongpu railway and the roads in western Shanxi to keep Japanese reinforcements away. The degree of destruction of the Zhengtai line was to be the measure of success.

The preparations were made in secret. Only the brigade commanders knew the objective. Scouts, hidden by the peasants, reconnoitred the Japanese posts, and local blacksmiths forged crowbars, picks and spanners for unbolting the track. The troops practised blowing up bridges and destroying rails, which were heated on fires made of sleepers and bent so that they could not be relaid.

The night of 20 August

The Zhengtai railway ran through the Taihang Mountains and linked the two great lines of northern China, Beijing–Hankou and Datong–Puzhou. Coal from Shanxi was carried along it, and along it stood the posts from which the Japanese set out on operations against the communist bases. They were weakly defended. According to a Japanese account, at Niangzi Pass (Niangziguan) a single company, split among six posts, guarded 20 kilometres of line. It held out only thanks to soldiers from a train that happened to be passing during the attack. At the Jingxing coal mine, one of the most important in northern China, each of the three shafts was guarded by a single squad. Each was attacked by more than a thousand Chinese, and one shaft was burned and wrecked so thoroughly that no coal was mined from it for six months.

Nie Rongzhen’s units took some of the fortifications at Niangzi Pass and blew up the railway bridge, while others destroyed the track between Shijiazhuang and Jingxing. The 129th Division captured several stations on the western section of the line and blew up bridges. One of its regiments held Shinao hill above Yangquan for six days, covering the destruction of the track against Japanese counter-attacks. The 120th Division cut the Tongpu railway in many places north of Taiyuan. Behind the troops came thousands of peasants and militiamen, who unbolted the track, burned sleepers, cut down telegraph poles and filled in culverts. The Japanese, taken by surprise, could not move reinforcements quickly along the wrecked lines and defended themselves in their posts. According to the Japanese official history, even Japanese civilians were armed.

Initially 22 regiments were to take part in the attack. Further units quickly joined in, however, including some that had received no orders, and after a few days the staff counted more than a hundred regiments. According to Chinese summaries there were 105: 39 from Nie Rongzhen’s district, 46 from the 129th Division and 20 from the 120th Division, over 200,000 soldiers in all, not counting militia and guerrillas. According to some sources, on 26 August Peng and Zuo Quan gave the operation the name “Battle of the Hundred Regiments”. The figure must, however, be treated with caution. A Chinese regiment (tuan) could be a unit of a few hundred men, and many of these regiments had only been formed in 1939 and 1940 from local volunteers, poorly armed and trained. The government’s representative in Xi’an reported to Chongqing that only 11 regiments had fought on the Zhengtai line, not more than thirty as Zhu and Peng claimed. Historians in Taiwan regarded the “hundred regiments” as propaganda. Even the communist leaders later admitted that publicising the figure had been a mistake.

The first phase

The first phase of the offensive lasted until 10 September. According to a Chinese account, by the end of August the Zhengtai railway had been paralysed along its entire length, and bridges, stations and stretches of track on other lines had been destroyed. The Japanese, however, recovered quickly. According to their figures, traffic on the Beijing–Hankou line was restored on 25 August, on the Tongpu railway on 8 September and, with difficulty, on the Zhengtai line on 20 September. On 30 August the First Army threw the 4th and 9th Independent Mixed Brigades into a counter-attack against the 129th Division. This operation, which the Japanese called the First Central Shanxi Operation, lasted until 18 September. The communist units, true to the principles of guerrilla warfare, dispersed and withdrew into the mountains.

The losses of both sides in the first phase are hard to establish, because each side counted in its own way. According to the internal figures of the Japanese First Army, it lost 199 killed, 283 wounded and 9 missing in the first phase. The Japanese claimed to have counted 4,880 bodies of Chinese soldiers and to have taken 263 prisoners. A government report from Xi’an put Japanese losses on the Zhengtai line at about 3,000 men, plus more than 2,000 collaborationist troops, and communist losses at a similar figure. Chinese communist sources give figures for the whole offensive many times higher.

The first news of the offensive was greeted with enthusiasm in Yan’an. Mao Zedong cabled Peng that the Hundred Regiments battle was “truly exhilarating” and asked whether one or two more such operations could be organised. The government in Chongqing also sent its congratulations. But as early as 11 September Mao recommended at a meeting of the Politburo that the operation should be presented not as a great offensive but as a “guerrilla counter-offensive”.

The sequel and the reprisals

The second phase began on 22 September. This time the communists attacked fortified Japanese strongpoints deep inside their own base areas and along the roads: the 129th Division on the road from Yushe to Liaoxian, Nie Rongzhen’s units near Laiyuan and Lingqiu, and the 120th Division again on the Tongpu railway. Assaults on fortified posts, contrary to the principles of guerrilla warfare, cost them heavy losses, and the Japanese, now prepared, defended themselves effectively and, according to Chinese sources, used poison gas. From October the First Army and the Mongolia Garrison Army went over to retaliatory “mopping-up” operations in the communist bases in the Taihang and Taiyue mountains and in north-western Shanxi. The Japanese burned villages, killed the inhabitants, destroyed grain stores and drove off cattle. At the end of October, at Guanjianao, Peng Dehuai personally led an attack on an encircled Japanese battalion, but had to withdraw with heavy losses when a relief force arrived. The party declared the offensive over on 5 December 1940, although fighting against the Japanese operations went on until January 1941.

Place in the war

The Hundred Regiments Offensive was the largest undertaking of the Eighth Route Army in the entire war, and the one closest to regular warfare. It did real damage to the Japanese. According to Japanese figures, 73 bridges and 3 tunnels were blown up, 20 stations burned, track destroyed at 117 points over a total length of more than 44 kilometres, and more than 2,400 telegraph poles cut down or pulled over. Chinese figures speak of 474 kilometres of track and 213 bridges destroyed. Chinese summaries from December 1940 state that more than 20,000 Japanese soldiers were killed or wounded (another version of the same document says more than 12,000), as well as more than 5,000 collaborationist troops. The hardest-hit 4th Independent Mixed Brigade lost 276 killed, according to Japanese records. According to figures from Japanese documents, the entire North China Area Army lost 2,349 killed and 4,004 wounded between August and December 1940. The communists admitted losing about 17,000 men themselves; other calculations put the figure at over 22,000.

The most important consequences of the offensive, however, were for the communists themselves and the people of northern China. The Japanese, who until then had regarded the government forces as their main enemy, realised how much the communist army had grown. They strengthened their intelligence, and in 1941, from July under a new commander of the North China Area Army, General Yasuji Okamura, began systematic campaigns against the communist bases. The Chinese called this the “Three Alls” policy: kill all, burn all, loot all. Hundreds of thousands of civilians died – by some estimates millions – and the population of the communist bases fell, according to the party’s own figures, from 44 to 25 million. Until 1943 the Eighth Route Army was unable to mount any further major operation. The government in Chongqing, alarmed by the communists’ strength, stopped their pay and ammunition supplies at the turn of 1940 and 1941, and in January 1941 government troops destroyed a column of the communist New Fourth Army in Anhui, which in practice ended the united front.

The offensive also became one of the most fiercely disputed episodes in the history of the Chinese Communist Party. During the Rectification Movement in Yan’an, and especially at the North China conference in 1945, Peng Dehuai had to answer for it. He was accused of prematurely revealing the party’s strength, bringing Japanese reprisals down on the bases and taking the pressure off the Kuomintang, and also of launching it without Mao’s knowledge. Peng and his defenders, among them Nie Rongzhen, pointed out that the plan had been sent to Yan’an and that Mao had initially praised it. The accusations returned at the Lushan Conference in 1959 and during the Cultural Revolution, when the Red Guards called the offensive a betrayal in the service of Chiang Kai-shek. Since Peng’s rehabilitation in 1978, official Chinese historiography has judged it a great victory. Japanese and Taiwanese historians stress that the Japanese quickly repaired the damage and that individual brigades counted their dead in hundreds, not thousands. The American historian Lyman Van Slyke sees it above all as an example of the problems of coordination and control between the party leadership in Yan’an and the commanders in the field.

Whatever the verdict, the Hundred Regiments Offensive showed in August 1940 that the war in China was no longer a contest between just two sides. Alongside Chiang Kai-shek’s government and the Japanese, a third force had grown up in northern China, one that Japan had to reckon with and that after 1945 would fight for the whole of China.