The Japanese take Nanning

On 24 November 1939 troops of the Japanese 5th Division under Lieutenant General Hitoshi Imamura broke into Nanning, the largest city in the southern part of Guangxi province, and by the evening had taken the whole of it. Imperial General Headquarters in Japan proclaimed its capture as a great success. Nine days earlier, on 15 November, Japanese troops had landed on the coast of the Gulf of Tonkin and in little more than a week had advanced some 150 kilometres inland. The object of the operation was not the city itself but the road that ran through it: the highway linking Nanning with the border of French Indochina. Japan, convinced that the war in Europe would tie the hands of France and Britain, had decided to cut one of the last routes by which Chiang Kai-shek’s government obtained arms, fuel and equipment from abroad.

In China the fighting that began then and lasted until February 1940 is called the Battle of South Guangxi (桂南會戰, Guinan huizhan). The Japanese called the advance on the city itself the Nanning Operation (南寧作戦, Nannei sakusen) and considered it concluded on 1 December 1939.

The route through Indochina

After the fall of Shanghai, Nanjing, Canton and Wuhan in 1937–1938, the Chinese government, which had moved to Chongqing, lost almost all its ports. Aid from abroad could reach it by only three routes: across Central Asia from the Soviet Union, along the new Burma Road from Rangoon, opened at the turn of 1938 and 1939, and through French Indochina. The last of these was the most important. Goods unloaded at Haiphong went either by rail through Hanoi to Kunming in Yunnan province, or by rail to Lạng Sơn and from there by lorry over the Zhennanguan border pass, through Longzhou and Nanning into the interior of China. According to Japanese intelligence, in September 1939 some 12,500 of the roughly 14,700 tons of supplies that reached China from abroad – about 85 per cent – passed through Indochina. Japanese studies also state that traffic on this route had increased roughly fourfold since 1938.

For months Tokyo had been pressing Paris to close the border. In the autumn of 1938 the French formally restricted the transit of arms, but in practice the traffic continued, because American and British merchants had an interest in it too. Diplomatic talks achieved nothing. As early as the spring of 1939 the Japanese navy, which in February had occupied the island of Hainan and built bases there, proposed a landing on the Guangxi coast and the capture of Nanning. It wanted not only to cut the highway but also to build airfields in Guangxi from which aircraft could bomb the Yunnan railway and the Burma Road.

At first the army would not hear of it, since its whole attention was fixed on the Soviet border and the fighting at Khalkhin Gol. The defeat in Mongolia changed the balance of power within the General Staff. The new chief of the operations bureau, Major General Kyōji Tominaga, backed the navy’s plan, and the 5th Division, one of the best in the army, which had earlier been earmarked as reinforcements for the Mongolian front, was assigned to carry it out. The outbreak of war in Europe settled the matter. On 4 September Nobuyuki Abe’s government announced that Japan would not become involved in the war in Europe and would concentrate on ending the “China Incident”. France and Britain, occupied with Germany, could no longer defend their interests in the Far East, and an operation close to the French border, previously postponed for fear of an international conflict, became possible. On 23 September the headquarters of the China Expeditionary Army was set up in Nanjing under General Toshizō Nishio, with General Seishirō Itagaki as his chief of staff. On 16 October Imperial General Headquarters ordered it, together with the navy, “to cut swiftly the enemy’s supply line along the Nanning–Longzhou road”. The middle of November was set as the date.

The news that Japan was preparing a blow in the west lifted spirits in China. A few weeks earlier the Chinese 9th War Area had repulsed a Japanese offensive against Changsha, which Chongqing celebrated as a great victory, and at a military conference at Nanyue at the end of October Chiang Kai-shek announced a shift from defence to offensive action.

The landing in Qinzhou Bay

The operation was entrusted to the 5th Division with its two infantry brigades – the 9th under Major General Genshichi Oikawa and the 21st under Major General Masao Nakamura – and the Taiwan Mixed Brigade under Major General Sadashichi Shioda. The whole was directed by the commander of the Japanese 21st Army in Canton, Lieutenant General Rikichi Andō. They were supported by ships of the 5th Fleet (renamed in November the 2nd China Expeditionary Fleet) and by aircraft of the navy’s 3rd Combined Air Group, and according to Chinese estimates by an aircraft carrier as well. Chinese sources put the Japanese forces at about 30,000 men, more than 70 warships and transports, and about a hundred aircraft.

On the Chinese side the coast and southern Guangxi were defended by the 16th Army Group, made up of Guangxi divisions, in all, according to Chinese figures, some 60,000 men spread over a vast area. Guangxi was the stronghold of the so-called Guangxi clique, Generals Li Zongren and Bai Chongxi, former rivals of Chiang Kai-shek who since 1937 had been fighting Japan at his side. When the blow fell, the command in the region was virtually absent. Bai Chongxi, head of the field headquarters in Guilin, had gone to Chongqing for a plenum of the Kuomintang, the commander of the 16th Army Group, Xia Wei, was attending his mother’s funeral, and the commander of the 4th War Area, Zhang Fakui, was far away at Shaoguan in Guangdong.

The convoy sailed from Sanya Bay on Hainan on 13 November. On 14 November some of the ships made a feint attack on Beihai, and during the night and morning of 15 November the main force began landing on the shores of Qinzhou Bay, near Longmen and in the area of Fangchenggang. The weather was bad and the sea rough, and the Chinese defenders were not expecting a landing. The battalions defending the shore gave way after a brief fight, and the poorly trained Chinese New 19th Division disintegrated. On 17 November the Taiwan Brigade took Qinzhou, to which the 21st Army headquarters moved on 20 November.

The march on Nanning

The 5th Division set off northwards in three columns along the highway from Qinzhou to Nanning. The Chinese destroyed the road and fell back, while the Japanese moved fast, often through mountainous, forested country, where local guides showed them the paths. On 21 November the leading units reached the southern bank of the Yong River, some 250 metres wide at that point, which curves around Nanning to the south. The Chinese command had managed only to move part of the Guangxi 135th Division into the city, and the 170th Division and a regiment of the 200th Division into the approaches. Chongqing, taken by surprise, sent Bai Chongxi back to Guangxi only on 16 November and placed under his command General Du Yuming’s 5th Corps, the only Chinese formation with tanks, which was travelling by rail from Hunan.

During the night of 23–24 November the Japanese forced the river. Soldiers swam across and brought back Chinese boats from the far bank, in which further units were ferried over. According to Japanese accounts the defenders counter-attacked the bridgehead dozens of times in hand-to-hand fighting at night. Chinese sources, however, state that during the night the commander of one of the 135th Division’s regiments withdrew two regiments from their positions on the river without orders, leaving the city practically undefended from the front. On 24 November Nakamura’s brigade from the south-east and Oikawa’s units from the west entered Nanning and occupied the headquarters and government buildings. For the next two days they cleared the city and took the surrounding hills. From 25 November, at Ertang, north-east of the city, the 170th Division and the regiment of the 200th Division, whose commander was killed, held out for two days. It was the heaviest fighting since the landing, but it did not stop the Japanese. On 26 November Andō handed command of all the forces in Guangxi to Imamura and returned to Canton.

The Japanese pressed on northwards towards the mountains that close off the Nanning valley. On 1 December they took the Gaofeng Pass, and on 4 December the Kunlun Pass (Kunlunguan) on the road to Binyang and Liuzhou. There they halted and went over to the defensive. According to the Japanese tally, by 1 December they had lost 145 killed and 315 wounded, while counting 6,125 bodies of Chinese soldiers on the battlefield and taking 664 prisoners. Chinese historians believe that the Japanese losses were understated. In Nanning the Japanese captured supplies destined for the front: hundreds of tons of lead, tin and cotton, coal and iron.

Kunlun and Longzhou

The Japanese hoped that the occupation of Guangxi would induce Li Zongren and Bai Chongxi, long at odds with Chiang Kai-shek, to break with the government in Chongqing. On 10 December Imamura sent them an open letter proposing “cooperation”. To no avail. Chiang Kai-shek made the recapture of Nanning a matter of the first importance and brought troops into Guangxi from several provinces – according to Japanese estimates more than a dozen divisions, some 150,000 men. On 18 December, as part of the Chinese Winter Offensive, Du Yuming’s 5th Corps attacked the Kunlun Pass. The fighting for it lasted until 31 December, when the Chinese retook it. General Nakamura was killed, and his brigade suffered heavy losses. China hailed Kunlun as one of its greatest victories of the war.

At the same time, in the second half of December, Oikawa’s detachment reached Longzhou and the Zhennanguan border pass in order to seize the goods stockpiled along the road from Indochina. It destroyed the lorries and fuel it captured, as it had no means of carrying them off, and returned to the Nanning area. The Japanese answered Kunlun with reinforcements. At the end of January and the beginning of February 1940, with the participation of the Guards Division and a brigade of the 18th Division, they routed the Chinese at Binyang. The front stabilised north of Nanning, which remained in Japanese hands.

Its place in the war

The capture of Nanning did not cut China off from Indochina completely, as the railway from Haiphong to Kunming went on working, but it closed the shortest route from the coast to Guangxi and central China and forced Chongqing to move south troops it needed elsewhere. Japan also gained airfields from which it could bomb the roads to Yunnan. The decision, however, came not in Guangxi but in Europe. In June 1940, after the fall of France, the authorities in Indochina, under Japanese pressure, closed the border with China and admitted a Japanese inspection commission, and in July Britain closed the Burma Road for three months. In September 1940 Japan entered northern Indochina; the attack on Lạng Sơn was led by none other than the 5th Division, which had come from Guangxi. Once the route had been cut at its source, holding Nanning no longer made sense. At the end of October 1940 the Japanese abandoned the city, and Chinese propaganda proclaimed its “recapture”.

The operation in Guangxi was Japan’s first step southwards, towards the European colonies in South-East Asia. The move into northern Indochina in September 1940, and into southern Indochina in July 1941, provoked the American oil embargo, which in December 1941 led to the war in the Pacific. With the routes through Indochina closed and, in 1942, Burma lost, China was left with a single supply route: the airlift over the Himalayas. Hitoshi Imamura later commanded the forces that took Java in 1942, and then the 8th Area Army at Rabaul.