The Japanese retreat in China

In mid-June 1945 the war in China turned clearly against Japan for the first time in years. The troops of General Yasuji Okamura’s China Expeditionary Army were withdrawing from the southern provinces they had taken only a few months earlier during Operation Ichi-Go, and Chinese divisions – for the first time in large numbers armed and trained by the Americans – were following them up. At the end of May the Chinese recovered Nanning; on 7 June their successful defence of western Hunan came to an end; and at the end of June Liuzhou fell. At the end of July the Japanese gave up Guilin without a pitched battle.

Many war chronologies state under 16 June that “the Japanese are in general retreat in central China”. This needs two qualifications. First, it was not a retreat forced by defeat, still less a flight: the Japanese Imperial General Headquarters itself ordered the line to be shortened and the corridor in Guangxi abandoned, and the Japanese withdrew in good order, covered by strong rearguards. Second, the retreat concerned above all southern China – Guangxi and southern Hunan; in central China, in the Yangtze valley, the Japanese not only stayed but were bringing in troops from the south. The date of 16 June does not correspond to any single event – it describes the state of affairs in the middle of the month.

China after Operation Ichi-Go

The Ichi-Go offensive, launched on 17 April 1944 with a crossing of the Yellow River, was the largest land operation of the Japanese army in the entire war. By December 1944 the Japanese had advanced from Henan through Hunan into Guangxi, taken Changsha, Hengyang, Guilin and Liuzhou, occupied Nanning for the second time and linked the front in China with their forces in Indochina. They had also seized the forward airfields of General Claire Chennault’s US Fourteenth Air Force, from which bombers attacked Japanese shipping and – like the Superfortresses flying from around Chengdu in the summer of 1944 – Japan itself.

The victory, however, proved to be of little worth. The Canton–Hankou railway that had been fought over was barely working: according to American studies, a single train ran along it from Canton to Wuhan in April 1945, and for lack of fuel Japanese soldiers moved mostly on foot. The captured corridor had to be garrisoned, and the front had grown longer by hundreds of kilometres, along which Chinese guerrilla units operated. The B-29 bombers from which Ichi-Go was meant to protect Japan were by then flying from the Marianas anyway.

China emerged from the offensive weakened, but its strategic position was improving. In October 1944 Roosevelt recalled General Joseph Stilwell, and his successor as chief of staff to Chiang Kai-shek and commander of US forces in China was General Albert Wedemeyer, who established much better relations with the Chinese leader. After the opening of the Stilwell Road in January 1945, truck convoys from India reached Kunming bringing equipment and fuel; airlift deliveries over the Himalayas were growing too. Experienced, American-equipped Chinese divisions returned to China from Burma.

Wedemeyer staked on quality rather than numbers. Chiang Kai-shek agreed that some 36 divisions – roughly a sixth of his army – would receive American arms, training and supplies and be placed under a unified command. These were the so-called Alpha divisions. American liaison officers and advisers from General Robert McClure’s Chinese Combat Command worked with the Chinese armies and divisions; the Americans did not, however, fight on land in their own units – their part in the fighting was above all in the air.

A change of strategy in Tokyo

At the beginning of 1945 Japan’s position in the Pacific was worsening month by month. The Americans landed on Luzon, then on Iwo Jima, and on 1 April on Okinawa. In January and February Imperial General Headquarters revised its China policy: the aim was no longer to be new conquests but defence against an American landing on the Chinese coast and preparation for a possible Soviet blow in Manchuria. The China Expeditionary Army – according to the American official history, one armoured division, 25 infantry divisions and 22 independent brigades, more than a million men in all south of the Great Wall in the summer of 1945 – was to concentrate in the Yangtze valley between Shanghai and Hankou, around the great ports and in northern China.

It had been commanded since November 1944 by General Yasuji Okamura, formerly commander of the North China Area Army. Under his command brutal pacification operations were carried out in northern China against the communist guerrillas, which the Chinese communists called the “Three Alls” policy (“burn all, kill all, loot all”); after the war, however, a Chinese tribunal in Shanghai acquitted him of war crimes charges, which remains controversial to this day.

Before the withdrawal got properly under way, the Japanese attempted one more offensive. Its objective was the airfield at Zhijiang in western Hunan – the last major American and Chinese air base in that part of China, about 430 kilometres from the wartime capital, Chongqing. Capturing the airfield, or even threatening it, was meant to deprive the Americans of air superiority over the railway corridor and to forestall the Chinese offensive that was in preparation.

The battle of western Hunan

General Ichirō Banzai’s Japanese Twentieth Army assembled in Hunan, around Shaoyang, forces estimated by the Americans at about 60,000 men and in other studies at about 80,000. Supply roads from Hengyang and Xiangtan were built in March using the forced labour of Chinese workers. The attack began in earnest on 13 April 1945, with three columns advancing westwards into the rugged terrain of the Xuefeng Mountains.

The Chinese were ready. The defence of western Hunan was entrusted to General He Yingqin, commander-in-chief of the Chinese ground forces, who drew up the battle plan together with General McClure: the Chinese armies were to halt the Japanese in the centre and strike at their flanks and rear. American transport aircraft flew the entire New Sixth Army – veterans of the Burma campaign – from Kunming to Zhijiang. The Chinese concentrated about 100,000–110,000 men; they were supported by several hundred aircraft of the Chinese air force and the Fourteenth Air Force, which held command of the air, attacked Japanese columns and dropped supplies to the fighting units.

Throughout the second half of April the Chinese 74th Army, defending the centre on a front several dozen kilometres wide, held the Japanese down in the mountains, where the narrow valleys favoured ambushes and mortar fire. At the beginning of May the Chinese went over to the counter-offensive: on 5 and 6 May the 94th Army smashed a Japanese detachment near Wuyang, and over the following days its divisions repeatedly outflanked the enemy, while the 18th and 100th Armies worked their way into his rear. The Japanese had to turn back and by 7 June were back at their starting positions. The Zhijiang airfield remained in Chinese hands.

The losses of both sides are given very differently. The American official history puts Japanese losses at about 1,500 killed and 5,000 wounded, and Chinese losses at no fewer than 6,800 killed and 11,200 wounded. The Chinese claimed to have inflicted more than 36,000 casualties on the enemy, including over 12,000 killed; post-war Japanese figures are inconsistent – in successive versions they rose from about 11,000 to 27,000 as the sick were added. Whatever the figures, the battle of western Hunan was a psychological breakthrough for the Chinese: after years of defeats, and especially after the disasters of 1944, the American-trained divisions showed that with numerical superiority, coordinated command, air support and regular supply they could beat the Japanese army in the open field. It was also the last Japanese offensive in China.

The retreat from Guangxi

In mid-May 1945, as the situation on Okinawa was becoming hopeless, Imperial General Headquarters ordered the evacuation of the railway to Guilin and Liuzhou – a branch of the main Hankou–Canton line, captured with such difficulty a few months earlier. According to the American official history, within a few days of the end of the fighting for Zhijiang General Okamura began transferring units from the south to central and northern China. Some forces were to strengthen the coast around Shanghai and the mouth of the Yangtze, others northern China and Manchuria, where an attack by the Red Army was expected.

The Chinese set off after the withdrawing enemy as part of a counter-offensive in Guangxi, planned by Chiang Kai-shek and General He Yingqin along several axes. General Zhang Fakui’s Second Front Army advanced on Nanning from the west and took it on 26–27 May; the Japanese fell back towards the border with Indochina and towards Liuzhou. General Tang Enbo’s Third Front Army marched on Liuzhou and beyond, towards Guilin. By mid-June Chinese columns were approaching Liuzhou, while Japanese rearguards defended one river crossing and pass after another to cover the main forces moving north.

Liuzhou returned to Chinese hands at the end of June: the American official history states that the Chinese retook its airfield on 26 June, while Chinese studies date the capture of the city to 30 June. Then came heavy fighting to cut off the Japanese line of retreat near Guilin, about 160 kilometres to the north. Before the Chinese could gather enough strength to attack, most of the Japanese had left the area; Guilin was occupied on 26–28 July, and rearguards were still fighting in north-eastern Guangxi until mid-August. By the beginning of August the Japanese had almost completed their regrouping into the areas they intended to defend to the end.

Wedemeyer’s plans

The Japanese withdrawal fitted into American plans, but it was not their aim. As early as 14 February 1945 Wedemeyer had presented Plan Beta: to seize the Liuzhou–Nanning area, consolidate there and advance on Canton and Hong Kong, so as to open a seaport for China and supply its army by sea rather than over the Himalayas. The Joint Chiefs of Staff approved it on 20 April. When the Japanese began to leave Guangxi of their own accord, the plan was revised and renamed Carbonado: in August the Chinese were to seize the port of Fort-Bayard (Zhanjiang) on the Leizhou Peninsula in a swift thrust, on 1 September launch the main offensive from the Guilin–Liuzhou area, and capture Canton by 1 November.

The Chinese advances in Guangxi in June were thus largely a matter of moving into the vacuum left by a withdrawing enemy. The American official history stresses that the Chinese advanced slowly and that the Japanese rearguards put up stiff resistance. For the government in Chongqing, however, every recovered city was an important political and propaganda success after the defeats of the previous year, and for the Fourteenth Air Force a chance to return to its lost airfields.

Place in the war

The retreat from Guangxi was the final chord of Operation Ichi-Go. Japan gave up the corridor for whose capture it had committed some half a million soldiers in 1944 and which had cost the lives of an enormous number of Chinese civilians, and concentrated on defending what it considered essential: the coast, the Yangtze valley, northern China and Manchuria. For China it meant the recovery of a large part of the territory lost a year earlier, though mostly without great battles.

The general Chinese offensive never took place. Before Plan Carbonado could be put into effect, in August 1945 atomic bombs fell on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the USSR declared war on Japan and struck into Manchuria, and the Emperor announced the surrender. The China Expeditionary Army, still more than a million strong and unbroken as a whole, surrendered on 9 September 1945 in Nanjing – General Okamura surrendered to General He Yingqin.

The June retreat also had consequences for the coming civil war. The Japanese withdrew from the south and concentrated in the cities and along the railways, while huge rural areas of northern and central China remained within reach of the communist guerrillas, who expanded their bases there. Chiang Kai-shek’s government, whose best divisions stood in the south, far from the great cities of the coast, had after Japan’s surrender to rely on American air and sea transport to take over Shanghai, Nanjing and Beijing before the communists. This rivalry foreshadowed the conflict that broke out in China soon after the end of the world war.