The Japanese reach the Yellow River

At the beginning of March 1938 the Japanese forces that had been advancing south from Beijing since the summer of 1937 stood on the northern bank of the Yellow River along the whole of its middle course, from the bend near Tongguan, where the river turns east, to the plains of northern Henan. On the far side of the broad, muddy river the Chinese troops dug in. In eight months the Japanese had taken almost the whole of North China, but here their advance came to a halt. For many years the Yellow River became a front line.

Some war chronologies give the date as 6 March, which cannot be tied to any single event. Reaching the river was a process that took several weeks. In Henan a Japanese division advanced along the Beijing–Hankou railway and came out on the river opposite Zhengzhou and Kaifeng in the second half of February. In Shanxi province the Japanese reached the bank at the beginning of March and, according to Chinese studies, took the Fenglingdu crossing opposite Tongguan on 9 March. The date of 6 March therefore marks reasonably well the moment when the whole Japanese line stood on the middle course of the river. It should also be remembered that the lower Yellow River, which in 1938 still flowed through Shandong province to the Bohai Gulf, had already been crossed by the Japanese in December 1937.

Eight months of marching south

After the Marco Polo Bridge incident in July 1937 the Japanese army in North China quickly defeated the troops of General Song Zheyuan and by the end of July had taken Beijing and Tianjin. In the autumn the North China Area Army formed there under General Hisaichi Terauchi set off south along three railway lines. In the west General Kiyoshi Katsuki’s 1st Army broke into the mountainous province of Shanxi. In the Battle of Taiyuan it defeated the troops of Yan Xishan, who had ruled the province for a quarter of a century, and of his allies from the central government, and in November it captured the provincial capital. In the east the 2nd Army advanced along the Tianjin–Pukou railway. The governor of Shandong, Han Fuju, withdrew his troops almost without a fight. On 23 December the Japanese crossed the Yellow River, and on 27 December they took Jinan – the same city in which, ten years earlier, the Jinan incident had taken place. On 24 January 1938 Han Fuju was shot on the orders of Chiang Kai-shek for fleeing before the enemy.

On the central sector the Japanese divisions halted in northern Henan in the autumn, because part of their strength had to be sent to Shanghai, where in a bloody battle the fate of the war in Central China hung in the balance. After the capture of Nanjing and the massacre committed there by Japanese troops, Tokyo expected Chiang Kai-shek to sue for peace. When he did not, Prime Minister Fumimaro Konoe announced on 16 January 1938 that Japan would no longer deal with his government. The General Staff, however, wanted to rebuild its forces and not to begin any new large operations before the summer, and on 16 February this decision was approved by a conference held in the presence of Emperor Hirohito. The armies in the field had plans of their own. The command in North China believed that the front had to be straightened and the Chinese pushed back across the Yellow River.

The February offensive

In February 1938 Japanese divisions advanced simultaneously in Shanxi and Henan. In Henan the 14th Division under General Kenji Doihara – the same intelligence officer who a few years earlier had orchestrated Japanese expansion in Manchuria – pushed along the Beijing–Hankou railway. Song Zheyuan’s troops withdrew westwards, and on 17 February the Japanese took Xinxiang, a railway junction not far from the river. Other units, coming from the direction of Shandong, occupied the counties on the river itself to the east of the railway. The advance and the occupation were accompanied by crimes against the civilian population. According to Chinese local studies, in Changyuan county the Japanese killed more than 1,700 people in a single massacre on 25 March.

In Shanxi, from mid-February, three Japanese divisions attacked southwards along the railway and the valley of the Fen River. At the end of February they took Linfen, where Yan Xishan had set up his headquarters after the loss of Taiyuan. At the beginning of March the Japanese occupied Houma and Yuncheng and reached the south-western corner of the province, where the Yellow River, which until then flows from north to south, turns sharply east. On the other side of the bend lies the Tongguan pass, for centuries the gateway to Shaanxi province and its capital Xi’an, through which the Longhai railway runs. According to Chinese studies, on 9 March the Japanese took the Fenglingdu crossing and in the afternoon shelled Tongguan and the railway line with artillery for the first time.

The river as a front

Japanese attempts to cross the river in Shanxi in the spring of 1938 failed. Chinese artillery and infantry defended the southern bank, and the Japanese lacked the strength both to force a great river and to hold the territory they had already taken. Behind them, there was no peace. The troops of Yan Xishan and of the central government had withdrawn into the mountains, and in northern and eastern Shanxi units of the communist Eighth Route Army were operating; after the formation of the Second United Front it formally fought as part of the National Revolutionary Army. The Japanese controlled the towns and the railways, but the villages and mountains were largely beyond their reach. Throughout the war the Japanese army never managed to cross the river at Tongguan and enter Shaanxi, and that province and the road to Sichuan, the Chinese government’s hinterland, remained safe.

In Henan the river protected Zhengzhou, the crossing point of China’s two most important railway lines: the Beijing–Hankou line running north to south and the Longhai line running east to west. Whoever held Zhengzhou could go by rail to Wuhan, where the Chinese government had been based since the fall of Nanjing, or west to Xi’an. The Japanese command therefore decided to outflank this barrier from the east. At the end of March a great operation began around the railway junction of Xuzhou, intended to link the Japanese conquests in the north with those in the Yangtze valley.

Significance

Reaching the Yellow River closed the first stage of the war in North China. In eight months Japan had conquered an immense territory with great cities, mines and railways, but it had not destroyed the Chinese army or forced Chiang Kai-shek to capitulate. The front kept lengthening and the Japanese forces were spread over an ever larger area.

Soon the river became the scene of one of the most terrible decisions of the war. In May 1938, during the Battle of Xuzhou, the 14th Division crossed the Yellow River far to the east of Zhengzhou, and at the beginning of June the Japanese took Kaifeng. To stop them, Chiang Kai-shek agreed to breach the flood dykes. On 9 June Chinese soldiers cut through the dyke at Huayuankou, north of Zhengzhou. The flood halted the Japanese and forced them to attack Wuhan by a roundabout route along the Yangtze valley, but it inundated thousands of villages in Henan, Anhui and Jiangsu. Estimates of the death toll range from 400,000 to 500,000; official figures from 1948, now considered inflated by many researchers, put it at nearly 900,000. Millions were left homeless. The Yellow River flowed south-east along a new course until 1947.

The line of the river and the flooded areas in Henan survived with few changes until the spring of 1944, when in the great Ichi-Go offensive the Japanese crossed it and occupied the rest of Henan. The war that Tokyo had intended in July 1937 to finish within a few months had turned into a gruelling struggle on a front thousands of kilometres long, which tied down most of the Japanese army and drove Japan to seek raw materials and a decision elsewhere – in South-East Asia and in a war with the United States.