The Japanese counter-offensive in Shanxi

On 1 January 1940, in the south-east of Shanxi province, on the plateau around the city of Changzhi, Japanese troops launched a counter-attack against the Chinese forces that since mid-December had been harassing the garrisons of the Japanese 36th Division. According to the Chinese official history, the Japanese gathered some 10,000 infantry, cavalry and artillerymen from the surrounding outposts and, with air support, attacked positions south-west of Changzhi. For two days heavy fighting swung back and forth; then, on 3 January, the Chinese 40th Corps struck the Japanese in the flank and forced them back to the outskirts of the city. It was one of many clashes in the Chinese winter offensive of 1939–1940, the first attempt since the war began by the army of Chiang Kai-shek to seize the initiative along almost the entire front at once.

The report that found its way into English-language chronologies of the war speaks of “ten thousand Japanese attempting to relieve the almost surrounded 36th Division”. It rests on the Chinese account. Japanese documents describe the same weeks differently, as set out below.

The winter offensive

In the autumn of 1939 the Chinese high command decided that the moment had come for a counter-offensive. The Japanese had failed to break the defences at Changsha, and their army in China, stretched across a vast area, was in the middle of replacing its large four-regiment divisions with smaller three-regiment ones and with weak independent mixed brigades intended to garrison the occupied territories. War had broken out in Europe, and Japan, which had declared that it would stay out of it, was receiving no reinforcements from home. At a military conference at Nanyue at the end of October 1939 Chiang Kai-shek announced a shift to offensive operations. The plan called for all the war zones to strike simultaneously, so that the Japanese could not shift forces from one sector to another. The main attacks were to be made by the 2nd, 3rd, 5th and 9th War Zones, which received newly trained and re-equipped divisions; the remaining zones were to tie down the enemy with supporting actions and sabotage. Preparations were to be completed by 26 November, and the first attacks went in during the last days of November and the beginning of December.

The longest sector fell to the 2nd War Zone in Shanxi, commanded by the ruler of the province, General Yan Xishan. The Japanese had taken Shanxi in 1937–1938, after the Battle of Taiyuan and their advance to the Yellow River, but they controlled only the towns, the railway and the main roads. The mountains around them were held by Chinese troops: Yan’s own units, government divisions sent by Chongqing and the communist Eighth Route Army. The Japanese First Army of Lieutenant General Yoshio Shinozuka, subordinate to the North China Area Army of Lieutenant General Hayao Tada, held the province with three divisions – the 36th, 37th and 41st – and several independent brigades. The main thrust of the 2nd War Zone was to cut the Datong–Puzhou railway in south-western Shanxi and isolate the Japanese divisions in the valley of the Fen River. In the east, in the mountains of the old Shangdang region around Changzhi, the 27th and 40th Corps were to attack the 36th Division and prevent it from helping its neighbours.

At Changzhi

The 36th Division of Lieutenant General Den’o Mai was one of the new divisions intended for garrison duty in the occupied territories, raised in February 1939 at Hirosaki in the north of Honshu. Its headquarters stood at Lu’an, as Changzhi was then called, and its battalions held the towns and fortified outposts across the plateau as far as Gaoping and Jincheng in the south. Facing it were two Chinese corps from outside Shanxi. The 27th Corps of General Fan Hanjie, with the 45th and 46th Divisions and the 8th Reserve Division and its headquarters in Lingchuan county, belonged to the forces of General Wei Lihuang’s 1st War Zone and cooperated with the Eighth Route Army of Zhu De. The 40th Corps was commanded by a veteran of Taierzhuang, General Pang Bingxun.

According to the Chinese official history, the attack began on 13 December. The 27th Corps took the outposts in front of Changzhi and Tunliu and surrounded the Japanese garrisons stationed there. It is this that later chronologies describe as the “almost surrounded” 36th Division. On 1 January 1940 the Japanese replied with a counter-attack south-west of Changzhi. The Chinese 46th Division and 8th Reserve Division defended a line of several villages and a temple, which changed hands repeatedly, with heavy losses on both sides. On the morning of 3 January the main body of the 40th Corps attacked the Japanese, who were now caught between two Chinese groupings, throughout the day and forced them to retreat to the outskirts of Changzhi. The 40th Corps then attacked Japanese outposts between Huguan and the southern approaches to the city. On 20 and 24 January Chinese units cut the road from Handan to Changzhi north-east of the city and took Licheng and the Dongyangguan pass, and on 28 January the town of Lucheng, although fighting continued to the east of it. Changzhi itself the Chinese did not take.

What the Japanese sources say

The available Japanese documents make no mention either of an encircled division or of a relief force 10,000 strong. They present these weeks as a series of operations of their own. According to a report of the 36th Division from August 1940, between 19 December 1939 and 24 January 1940 the division carried out several “mopping-up” operations against the Chinese 40th and 27th Corps in the Gaoping area, south of Changzhi. Each involved three or four infantry battalions and two or three artillery battalions with other units – several thousand men at a time. The division reported that it had engaged more than 10,000 Chinese troops, counted 2,977 abandoned bodies, taken 53 prisoners and captured 235 rifles, while losing 167 killed and 313 wounded itself. The Chinese figures for the two corps for December and January are more modest than the Japanese tally of enemy dead: 835 killed, 1,419 wounded and 109 missing. Both sides, then, counted the enemy’s losses more generously than their own, but both accounts agree that around the turn of the year there was hard fighting at Changzhi, in which the Japanese failed to throw back the Chinese corps and the Chinese failed to drive the Japanese out of the towns.

The Japanese 37th Division acted in a similar way in south-western Shanxi. As early as 3 December, just before the Chinese offensive, it attacked Chinese forces in the Zhongtiao Mountains above the Yellow River (the Chinese account speaks of its defeat, the Japanese of a success), and from 31 December to 7 January it conducted another mopping-up operation there. The Japanese, in other words, did not wait passively in encircled garrisons but responded with sorties from the towns, and the action of 1 January at Changzhi was one of them.

Fratricidal fighting in the background

The main attack of the 2nd War Zone in south-western Shanxi failed to achieve its aim. The Chinese surrounded several Japanese outposts and cut the railway in places, but they took no towns and did not sever the Datong–Puzhou line for any length of time, except for the stretch between Wenxi and Anyi. One of the reasons was a conflict that broke out within the war zone itself. Since 1936 Yan Xishan had cooperated with the communists, and after the outbreak of war he allowed them to organise the so-called New Army, volunteer units which by 1939 had grown to several tens of thousands of men and which in large part took their orders not from him but from the Communist Party. In the spring of 1939 Yan tried to strip them of their independence. At the turn of November and December, just as the offensive was beginning, fighting broke out in western Shanxi between Yan’s “old” army and units of the New Army, much of which went over to the communists. The Chinese communists call these events the “December Incident” and accuse Yan of attacking his allies in collusion with the Japanese; the government in Chongqing and Yan himself spoke of a mutiny and of the treacherous seizure of units by the communists. In January 1940 further regiments went over to the communists. By February the fighting had died down: Yan kept south-western Shanxi, while the north-west of the province fell to the Eighth Route Army. The historiography of the Republic of China regards this conflict and the later clashes with the communists as the greatest loss of the winter offensive, because instead of attacking the Japanese, part of the forces in Shanxi were fighting one another.

On other fronts

On the other sectors the offensive brought mixed results. General Xue Yue’s 9th War Zone recaptured Chongyang in southern Hubei as early as 12 December and for several weeks attacked the Canton–Hankou railway south of Wuhan. The 3rd War Zone attacked Japanese positions and shipping on the lower Yangtze, the 5th War Zone of Li Zongren advanced in northern Hubei, and on 20 December the 8th War Zone briefly broke into Baotou in Suiyuan. In the south, in Guangxi, where the Japanese had taken Nanning in November, Chinese troops recaptured the Kunlun Pass on 31 December, which Chongqing celebrated as one of the greatest victories of the war. In the first days of January 1940 the 4th War Zone pushed back the Japanese who had advanced north from Canton into the interior of Guangdong.

The Japanese China Expeditionary Army of General Toshizō Nishio, whose chief of staff was General Seishirō Itagaki, was taken aback by the strength of the Chinese blow. According to Japanese monthly reports, in December 1939 alone the North China Area Army lost 766 killed and 1,662 wounded, and the Eleventh Army in central China 1,404 killed and 3,847 wounded. Nowhere, however, did the Chinese manage to capture an important city or destroy a large Japanese grouping. In January and February the Japanese began to counter-attack: in Guangxi they routed Chinese forces near Binyang, and in Suiyuan at the end of January they advanced on Wuyuan.

Place in the war

The fighting at Changzhi was of local significance, but it shows well what the Chinese winter offensive was. For the first time since the fall of Wuhan, China proved that it could attack simultaneously along the whole front, from Inner Mongolia to Guangxi, and inflict losses on the Japanese that forced Tokyo to rethink its position. It lacked, however, the artillery, aircraft and supplies needed to take fortified cities. The war in China reached a stalemate. Japan sought a way out by striking at China’s supply routes: in June 1940 it captured Yichang on the Yangtze, from where its aircraft bombed Chongqing, and in the summer, after the fall of France, it forced the closure of the border with Indochina and, for three months, of the Burma Road.

In Shanxi the winter of 1939–1940 brought a lasting split in the Chinese camp. Disputes between government troops and the communists spread in the spring of 1940 to the borderlands of Shanxi, Hebei and Henan and foreshadowed larger clashes, above all the destruction of the communist New Fourth Army in January 1941. In the summer of 1940 the Eighth Route Army launched its own great offensive against the Japanese-held railways of North China, known as the Hundred Regiments Offensive. Yan Xishan, now at odds with the communists, began secret talks with the Japanese in 1940. In May 1941 Japanese forces routed government troops in the Zhongtiao Mountains and drove them back across the Yellow River, and Fan Hanjie’s 27th Corps, which had fought at Changzhi at the turn of 1939 and 1940, was then encircled in south-eastern Shanxi.