Nanning and the threat to Kunming

On 24 November 1944 units of the Japanese 23rd Army, advancing from the direction of Guangzhou (Canton) and the West River valley, entered Nanning, the capital of Guangxi province in southern China. It was the second time the Japanese had taken the city during the war: Nanning had first fallen in November 1939, when Japan wanted to cut China off from supplies coming through French Indochina. This time the capture of the city was the closing chord of the fighting in Guangxi, conducted as part of Operation Ichi-Go – the largest land offensive in the history of the Japanese army, launched in April 1944 with a crossing of the Yellow River in Henan.

Popular war chronologies record under 25 November that the Japanese took Nanning, and under 30 November that Kunming – site of the Chengkung airfield and Kunming airport – was threatened by Japanese attacks. Both entries need qualifying. According to Chinese and Japanese studies, Nanning was taken on 24 November, a day earlier. Kunming itself, on the other hand, was never attacked: the Japanese advance from Guangxi into Guizhou province reached Dushan at the beginning of December and threatened the provincial capital, Guiyang. From there roads led both to Chongqing, China’s wartime capital, and to Kunming, the terminus of the air bridge from India. The threat to Kunming was therefore real but indirect – in Chongqing and in the American headquarters it was reckoned that if Guiyang fell, nothing would stop the Japanese marching on Yunnan.

Guangxi before the offensive

Since the 1920s Guangxi had been the power base of the so-called Guangxi clique, whose leaders were General Li Zongren and General Bai Chongxi. Both fought Japan alongside Chiang Kai-shek’s government but remained distrustful of him, and the province retained considerable autonomy. After the loss of the coast Guilin became one of the largest cities of “Free China”: refugees from the occupied provinces, publishing houses, schools, theatres and small industries took shelter there, and the population grew several times over.

For the Americans Guangxi mattered above all for its airfields. At the airfields near Guilin and Liuzhou were stationed forward units of General Claire Chennault’s Fourteenth Air Force. From there fighters and bombers attacked Japanese shipping off the Chinese coast and in the South China Sea, and railways and airfields in the occupied provinces. Since 1942 Chennault had argued that a small but well-supplied air force could do more damage to Japan than the Chinese ground army. The Japanese planners of Ichi-Go saw it in a similar light: alongside opening an overland link to Indochina, one of the operation’s main aims was to destroy the bases from which the Americans could bomb Japan and its shipping. The first B-29 raids from the airfields near Chengdu in the summer of 1944 only confirmed Tokyo in this view, although the strategic bombers’ bases lay in Sichuan, far beyond the reach of the offensive.

The fall of Guilin and Liuzhou

After taking Hengyang in August 1944 General Isamu Yokoyama’s Japanese 11th Army moved south along the Hunan–Guangxi railway, while the 23rd Army approached from the direction of Guangzhou. Both came under the 6th Area Army of General Yasuji Okamura, formed at the end of August. The Americans did not wait for the enemy to arrive: according to American studies, the bases near Guilin were evacuated and blown up in mid-September, and the airfield at Liuzhou at the beginning of November. The provincial authorities ordered the evacuation of Guilin’s civilian population. Hundreds of thousands of people set off westwards towards Guizhou on foot or in overcrowded trains and trucks; many died along the way of exhaustion, disease and hunger, and the exact number of victims of this flight cannot be established.

At the beginning of November, after a brief pause, the 11th Army struck at Guilin and Liuzhou simultaneously. The Guangxi leaders decided that neither city could be held and withdrew their main forces; Guilin was left with a garrison made up largely of units already bled white in Hunan. The city fell on 10 November, Liuzhou the next day or the same day – the sources differ by a dozen or so hours. In Guilin the commander of the 131st Division, General Kan Weiyong, who had refused to retreat, was killed. The city, abandoned by most of its inhabitants, largely burned down. The Japanese commander of the China Expeditionary Army, Field Marshal Shunroku Hata, later suspected that the Guangxi generals had been sparing their troops for the post-war struggle for power; Chiang Kai-shek, for his part, blamed the provincial commanders for giving up the cities too easily.

Two weeks later, on 24 November, the 23rd Army – according to English-language studies chiefly its 22nd Division – took Nanning. The city was not strongly defended. The Japanese columns pressed on south-west towards the border of French Indochina, where Japanese troops had been stationed since 1940 – their entry into Tonkin after the agreement with the Vichy authorities in September 1940 had been a direct consequence of the first operation in Guangxi. On 10 December units from Guangxi linked up at Suilu with troops coming from Indochina. A continuous land corridor now appeared on the map, running from Manchuria and Korea through Beijing, Hankou and Guangzhou to Hanoi and Saigon.

The strategic value of this corridor was limited, however. Japan no longer had the fuel or the rolling stock to move large volumes of traffic along it, and the railways in the south had been destroyed in many places by the retreating Chinese and by American aircraft. The planned overland route was meant to replace the shipping that American submarines and aircraft were sinking at an ever faster rate, but in practice it never came into operation on any significant scale before the end of the war.

The Fourteenth Air Force’s lost bases

For Chennault the autumn of 1944 was the defeat of his concept. From Hengyang through Lingling, Guilin and Liuzhou to Nanning, the Fourteenth Air Force lost within a few months most of its forward airfields in eastern China, and with them stocks of fuel and equipment brought in with great difficulty by air over the Himalayas. Chennault blamed the lack of supplies and Stilwell, who in his view had stinted him of deliveries over the Himalayas; Stilwell, for his part, believed that the supplies swallowed by the air force had been taken from the Chinese ground forces that were supposed to defend the bases, and had warned from the start that an air force without protection on the ground would provoke a Japanese offensive the Chinese could not repel. Both sides of the dispute were partly right. Chennault’s aircraft inflicted heavy losses on the Japanese on roads and railways during Ichi-Go, but they could not stop the infantry’s advance.

At the end of November the war also brought a tragic mistake: according to Chinese figures, on 27 November American aircraft, because of an error in recording the target, bombed the small town of Liuzhai, held by the Chinese, killing about a thousand soldiers and many refugees.

Wedemeyer in place of Stilwell

The defeats in Guangxi coincided with the most serious crisis in Sino-American relations during the war. General Joseph Stilwell, Chiang Kai-shek’s chief of staff and commander of American forces in China, Burma and India, had long been at odds with the Generalissimo; Chiang had tried to get rid of him as early as the autumn of 1943. In the summer of 1944, as the front in Hunan was falling apart, Stilwell convinced General George Marshall that the only remedy was to give him command of all Chinese forces. In September Franklin Delano Roosevelt demanded this of Chiang in sharp terms, and Chiang replied by demanding the American’s recall. According to the US official history, on 18 October Roosevelt gave way. Stilwell’s functions were divided: command of American forces in China and the post of Chiang’s chief of staff went to General Albert C. Wedemeyer, until then deputy chief of staff to Admiral Louis Mountbatten in South-East Asia, while General Daniel Sultan took command of the forces in Burma and India. Wedemeyer arrived in Chongqing at the end of October, just as the Japanese were preparing to strike at Guilin.

From his first days the new commander took a very gloomy view of the situation. In reports to Washington, quoted by American historians, he wrote of chaos in the Chinese command, of divisions that existed only on paper, and of soldiers dying of malnutrition. Instead of confrontation he chose cooperation with Chiang: he began with a plan to defend the area most important to the Allies – Kunming and the roads leading to it – and only then turned to reforming the Chinese army.

Why Kunming

Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province, was in 1944 the most important point in the whole Allied effort in China. Here landed the transport aircraft flying from Assam over the Himalayas – over “the Hump”, as the airmen called the route – and here the land road being built from Ledo, which was to join the old Burma Road, was to arrive. Kunming housed the headquarters of the Fourteenth Air Force, and around the city, including at Chenggong (Chengkung in English sources), lay its units’ airfields and supply depots. The loss of Kunming would have cut the only route by which American aid reached China, and at the same time cut Chongqing off from the world.

The Japanese offensive was not aimed at Kunming. The headquarters of the China Expeditionary Army, commanded from 22–23 November by General Okamura in place of Field Marshal Hata, intended above all to secure the corridor it had won. But in the last days of November the Japanese 3rd and 13th Divisions, pursuing broken Chinese units, crossed the border of Guizhou and advanced north along the road and railway. There were no serious forces in their way. Panic broke out in Guiyang and Chongqing, and crowds of refugees streamed westwards along the highway. According to American accounts, even the evacuation of the Chinese government from Chongqing was considered, which Chiang opposed. Wedemeyer prepared the Alpha plan, which provided for Kunming to be defended by picked Chinese divisions transferred there.

The offensive halted

The crisis was resolved in the first days of December, after 30 November. According to Japanese and Chinese studies, on 2 December the Japanese vanguard reached Dushan, about 100 kilometres from Guiyang. The Japanese, however, were at the end of their strength: their supply lines stretched more than a thousand kilometres from Hankou, they were short of fuel, ammunition and food, and the soldiers were living by plundering the surrounding villages. Okamura had no intention of waging a campaign in the mountains of Guizhou, and a few days later the troops withdrew south from Dushan. At the same time Wedemeyer and Chiang were bringing up reinforcements: among the forces sent to the Guizhou front were armies that had until then been blockading the communists in the north-west, and in December American transport aircraft flew two American-trained Chinese divisions from northern Burma to the Kunming area (Operation Grubworm). There was no battle for Kunming. On 10 December, after the link-up with the troops from Indochina, the Japanese command declared Operation Ichi-Go complete.

Place in the war

The fall of Guilin, Liuzhou and Nanning was Japan’s last great land victory of the war. The Japanese destroyed a large part of the Nationalist army, took control of territory inhabited by tens of millions of people and forced the Americans to abandon their bases in eastern China. The civilian population of Guangxi paid a high price for this: Chinese sources attribute to the Japanese the deaths of more than 200,000 civilians in the province – in reprisals, during plundering and in the fighting – although these figures have not been independently verified; on top of that came the victims of flight, famine and epidemics.

Japan did not, however, achieve the strategic aim of Ichi-Go. The B-29 bombers it was meant to defend against were already flying from the Marianas: from October 1944 Saipan had become the base of XXI Bomber Command, and at the end of November the first raid on Tokyo took off from the island. The corridor to Indochina never became an efficient supply route, and the troops committed in China were missing in the Philippines and the Pacific. In the spring of 1945 the Japanese, fearing an American landing on the Chinese coast and under threat on other fronts, began to withdraw from Guangxi; the Chinese recovered Nanning at the end of May, Liuzhou at the end of June and Guilin in July 1945.

The most lasting consequences of the autumn of 1944 were political. The defeat in Guangxi and Stilwell’s recall undermined faith in the United States in the ability of Chiang Kai-shek’s government to wage war; for the first time the American press wrote openly about corruption and decay in the Nationalist army. The Nationalist forces were exhausted, while the communists in the north, almost untouched by the offensive, were expanding their bases behind the Japanese lines. In 1945 Wedemeyer managed to train and equip some Chinese divisions, but the weakening caused by Operation Ichi-Go weighed heavily on the civil war that broke out in China soon after Japan’s surrender.