The Japanese cross Lake Dongting

Around 26 September 1939 Japanese troops advancing from Yueyang on Changsha, the capital of Hunan province, crossed to the south bank of the Miluo River. In the space of a few days they had broken through two of the four lines of defence that the Chinese 9th War Area had prepared on the road to the city, and a landing force, carried by boat from Yueyang along the eastern shore of Lake Dongting, had come ashore on the flank of the Chinese forces. Only a few dozen kilometres now separated the Japanese from Changsha – less than half the distance they had had to cover from their starting positions. The Chinese command knew that the moment of decision was approaching: either it would give up the city, or it would fight a battle before it.

Popular chronologies describe these days in two sentences. Under 24 September they state that the Japanese 6th and 13th Divisions “drove the Chinese National Revolutionary Army from the area of the Xiangjiang River”, and under 26 September that the Japanese army “crossed Lake Dongting”, cutting the distance to Changsha by more than half. Both sentences need explanation. The river on which the fighting took place was not the Xiang Jiang, the main river of Hunan, on which Changsha stands, but the small Xinqiang (新墙河), which flows into Lake Dongting a few dozen kilometres south of Yueyang. In English-language texts the two names are easily confused. Of the 13th Division, only a detachment drawn from it under General Akira Nara took part in the attack. Nor did the Japanese cross Lake Dongting: rather, they carried a landing force along its eastern edge, close to the shore, and put it ashore behind the Chinese positions. The dates given in different sources diverge: Chinese studies state that the crossing of the Xinqiang and the landing on the lake took place on 23 September, and that the Japanese forced the Miluo on 25 and 26 September.

On the Xinqiang River

The offensive, which began on 14 September with an attack by Japanese divisions in northern Jiangxi, extended to northern Hunan on 18 September. That day the 6th Division under General Shirō Inaba, together with the detachments of Generals Akira Nara and Mikio Uemura – some 50,000 troops in all, with strong artillery and air support – attacked the Chinese outposts north of the Xinqiang River. The sector was defended by the Chinese 15th Army Group under General Guan Linzheng, above all by its 52nd Army. For several days the Chinese held out on fortified hills and counter-attacked. According to Chinese sources, the Japanese made large-scale use of poison gas in the process. Japan had signed the Geneva Protocol banning chemical weapons in 1925 but had not ratified it, and the research of Japanese historians, above all Yoshiaki Yoshimi, has confirmed that in 1938 and 1939 the Japanese army used irritant and blister gases in China in many operations.

By 22 September the Japanese had taken the north bank of the river. At dawn on 23 September, after a heavy artillery preparation, the 6th Division forced the Xinqiang west of the small town of Xinqiang, while Nara’s detachment crossed further east, near Yanglinjie. The Chinese defence on the south bank, organised on the principle of “withdrawing ahead of the decisive battle”, was not meant to hold at any cost. When the Japanese broke through the first positions, the 52nd Army and neighbouring units fell back southwards towards the Miluo and into the mountains to the east, from where they could strike at the flank and rear of the attackers. It is this withdrawal from the Xinqiang area, lasting until 24 September, that the chronologies call the expulsion of the Chinese from the river.

The landing on Lake Dongting

At the same time the Japanese carried out a manoeuvre intended to take the defenders by surprise. General Uemura’s detachment, formed from units of the 3rd Division, reinforced with naval infantry and supported by navy gunboats and launches, set out from Yueyang on the evening of 22 September. Its boats sailed along the eastern shore of Lake Dongting, a vast, shallow body of water into which the largest rivers of Hunan flow. On the morning of 23 September part of the detachment landed near Lujiao, and the main force further south, near Yingtian, at the mouth of the Miluo, a few dozen kilometres behind the Chinese defence line on the Xinqiang. The landing threatened the western flank of the Chinese forces and their line of retreat. The defenders had to shift part of their forces there, which eased the 6th Division’s advance from the north.

Across the Miluo

The Miluo, flowing from east to west into Lake Dongting, was the second Chinese line of defence. The Japanese reached it on 24 and 25 September. The Chinese repulsed the first attempts to cross, but on 25 and 26 September Japanese units crossed to the south bank at several points. On the day under which the chronologies place the “crossing of Lake Dongting”, therefore, the Japanese had both rivers of northern Hunan behind them, and Uemura’s detachment stood on the lake level with the Miluo. Between them and Changsha there remained only two smaller rivers, the Laodao and the Liuyang, and a few dozen kilometres of hilly country.

In the east, in the mountains where Hunan, Hubei and Jiangxi meet, the 33rd Division, which had set out from the Tongcheng area on 22 September, and part of Nara’s detachment advanced on Pingjiang, breaking the resistance of General Yang Sen’s 27th Army Group. This column was to cut off the Chinese forces’ line of retreat to the east and close them in a pincer with the 6th Division. In northern Jiangxi, by contrast, the advance of the Japanese 101st and 106th Divisions stalled. On 22 September the Chinese retook Gao’an there, and the divisions that were to join the forces advancing from Yueyang across the mountains never reached the Hunan border.

What came next

The rapid Japanese progress did not mean victory. The further they went, the harder supply became. The Chinese had dug up the roads and turned them into rice paddies, the population had gone into the mountains, and the grain stocks had been carried away. Japanese lorries, guns and tanks sank into the mud, and supply columns were attacked by Chinese units coming down from the mountains. In Chongqing Chiang Kai-shek and his advisers were inclined to give up Changsha without a fight in order to preserve their forces. According to Chinese accounts, General Xue Yue, acting commander of the 9th War Area, refused. At the end of September his troops attacked the forward Japanese columns near Fulinpu and on the Laodao River. The Japanese 6th Division reached the approaches to Changsha but did not enter the city.

At the turn of September and October the commander of the 11th Army, General Yasuji Okamura, ordered a withdrawal. The Japanese fell back under pressure from Chinese forces, and on 6 October Okamura announced that the aim of the operation – inflicting heavy losses on the 9th War Area – had been achieved. By around 8 October his troops were back north of the Xinqiang, and by the middle of the month both sides stood on the same positions as before the battle. The Chinese government proclaimed a “great victory at Changsha”, and the city became a symbol of Chinese resistance.

Significance

The crossings of the Xinqiang and the Miluo and the landing on Lake Dongting were the high point of the Japanese offensive of the autumn of 1939. They demonstrated the Japanese army’s superiority in artillery, air power and manoeuvre, including manoeuvre by way of rivers and lakes. Yet they also showed its weakness in the second phase of the Sino-Japanese War: Japanese forces could drive deep into Chinese territory, but they could not hold on there when the enemy gave up ground, destroyed the roads and attacked their supply lines. The same pattern was repeated in the later battles for Changsha, in 1941 and at the turn of 1941 and 1942. On those occasions the Japanese crossed the same rivers and again withdrew, until in 1944, in the Ichi-Go offensive, they took the city. The war in China, in which fighting such as that on the Xinqiang and the Miluo tied down hundreds of thousands of Japanese soldiers, merged with the war in the Pacific in December 1941 into a single world war.