Operation Ichi-Go begins

On the night of 17–18 April 1944 a company of the Japanese 227th Infantry Regiment of the 37th Division crossed the new course of the Yellow River near Zhongmou in Henan province and struck at the rear of the Chinese positions. At the same time, divisions of Lieutenant General Eitarō Uchiyama’s Japanese Twelfth Army had for several days been crossing a rebuilt railway bridge north of Zhengzhou. So began Operation Ichi-gō (“Operation Number One”), known in Japan also as the Continental Cross-Through Operation (Tairiku Datsū Sakusen) and in China as the Battle of Henan–Hunan–Guangxi. Its first phase was Operation Kogo – the battle for central Henan, whose aim was to gain control of the entire railway line from Beijing to Hankou.

Many chronologies speak of “more than 600,000” Japanese soldiers. Japanese and Western studies give more modest, though still enormous, figures: usually about 500,000 men (some accounts give 510,000), 17 infantry divisions, an armoured division and several independent brigades, some 800 tanks, 1,500 guns, 15,000 vehicles and 70,000–100,000 horses. Not all of these forces set off on 17 April – a few tens of thousands of soldiers fought in the first echelon in Henan, and the rest went into action in the following months. The objective mentioned by those same chronologies is, however, correct: the airfields from which American bombers attacked Japanese shipping and could reach Japan. A second, equally important objective was an overland route from North China to French Indochina. The Japanese military historian Takeshi Hara called Ichi-gō the largest operation in the history of the Japanese army.

Why Japan struck in China

By the beginning of 1944 Japan’s defensive perimeter in the Pacific was cracking. The Americans had taken the Gilbert and Marshall Islands, in February they wrecked the base at Truk, and submarines were sinking Japanese ships faster than the shipyards could replace them. Shipping oil, rubber and ores by sea from South-East Asia was becoming ever harder. Since the summer of 1943, therefore, the General Staff in Tokyo had been considering a plan for an overland link: a chain of railway lines from Manchuria and Korea through Beijing, Hankou and Canton to the Indochinese border. The Japanese garrisons in China were to seize and hold it, because the navy was no longer able to guarantee safe sea lanes.

The second reason was the American airfields. From 1942 General Claire Chennault’s air force had been operating in south-eastern China; in March 1943 it became the Fourteenth Air Force. His bombers, flying from bases at Guilin, Liuzhou, Hengyang and Suichuan, attacked shipping on the Yangtze and off the coast. On 25 November 1943 American and Chinese aircraft bombed the airfield at Hsinchu on Taiwan – this first large American raid from China on Taiwan destroyed several dozen Japanese aircraft according to American figures and caused serious alarm in Tokyo. The Japanese also knew that the Americans were preparing bases in China for the new B-29 Superfortress heavy bombers, capable of reaching the Japanese home islands. Some 300,000 conscripted peasants and 75,000 contract labourers were building four large airfields around Chengdu in Sichuan almost with their bare hands; the Combined Chiefs of Staff approved the bombing plan (Operation Matterhorn) on 10 April 1944, and the first B-29 landed near Chengdu on 24 April.

The plan was approved in January 1944. According to some studies, Emperor Hirohito sanctioned it on 24 January. Its authors, however, did not agree on its aim. Hideki Tōjō, who in February also became Chief of the General Staff, is said in Japanese literature to have instructed that the operation be limited to destroying the airfields and to “show no unnecessary greed”, whereas the head of the General Staff’s operations section, Colonel Takushirō Hattori, insisted on the full railway corridor. The headquarters of the China Expeditionary Army, led by General Shunroku Hata, added the destruction of the Chinese forces that might rebuild the airfields. Some Japanese historians also suggest that a great victory in China was meant to improve Japan’s position ahead of possible negotiations.

China in the seventh year of war

The Japanese blow fell on a state at the end of its strength. The government of Chiang Kai-shek, who in the autumn of 1943 had also become Chairman of the National Government, had been waging war for seven years without the industry of the coast, cut off from the sea, and since 1942 – after the loss of Burma – supplied only by air over the Himalayas. Galloping inflation was wiping out the salaries of officials and the pay of soldiers. To survive, the army farmed its own fields, traded, and smuggled goods across the front line; recruits were taken from the villages by force, and many died of hunger and disease before they reached their units. American observers and Chinese critics of the government alike described a decline in discipline and rampant corruption in the headquarters.

Strategy also divided the allies. At Cairo Chiang had agreed to a major offensive in Burma provided the Western Allies committed substantial forces, but after the Cairo and Tehran conferences those promises were largely withdrawn. In January 1944 Chiang warned President Franklin Delano Roosevelt that the Japanese would exploit China’s weakness. Meanwhile General Joseph Stilwell, long at odds with Chiang, was leading American-trained Chinese divisions in the Hukawng Valley in northern Burma and demanding that Y Force in Yunnan also advance into Burma. At the beginning of April Washington threatened to halt Lend-Lease deliveries if these best Chinese units were not used in Burma; they crossed the Salween in May, when the battle in Henan was already over.

Chinese intelligence had expected a Japanese offensive since March but misread its direction. It was believed that the Yellow River bridge would not be passable before May, and troop movements in the north were taken for a feint; a larger blow was expected in the south. Central Henan was the responsibility of General Jiang Dingwen’s 1st War Area, whose deputy, General Tang Enbo, in practice directed most of the troops. On paper Chiang had about 400,000 soldiers in northern China, but many divisions were far below their establishment strength and short of artillery, ammunition and transport.

Henan after the great famine

The province that took the blow was only just emerging from one of the worst catastrophes of the war. Since 1938 Henan had been cut in two by the front: the east was held by the Japanese, the west belonged to the Chongqing government. In the spring and summer of 1942 drought struck, and in 1943 locusts as well, while the authorities on both sides of the front went on requisitioning grain to feed their armies. The Chinese land tax paid in kind was not reduced in time, and local officials and officers traded in the stocks. A famine broke out that lasted until the spring of 1943. According to the American historian Lloyd Eastman, as many as 3 million people left the province, fleeing mostly west to Shaanxi; there was talk of cannibalism and of children being sold.

The death toll remains disputed. An official tally of 1943 gave almost 1.5 million, but it also included refugees and the fall in births. Eastman estimated the deaths from starvation at 2–3 million, whereas the Australian scholar Anthony Garnaut, drawing on demographic data, believes there were far fewer than a million, probably around 700,000. The world learned of the famine mainly through Theodore H. White’s report in Time magazine in March 1943; it angered Chiang but forced the authorities to provide relief.

The memory of the famine and the requisitions determined how the peasants behaved a year later. Tang Enbo’s troops had a bad reputation in Henan; according to a saying quoted by historians, the province had been visited by “four plagues: flood, drought, locusts and Tang Enbo”. When in April and May 1944 the armies of the 1st War Area began to fall back, in many places – as American journalists and diplomats reported, and Eastman and other historians after them – the local population refused to help, did not destroy the roads despite orders, took abandoned weapons, and even disarmed and killed fleeing soldiers. For the Chongqing government this was a particularly painful signal: the countryside on which China’s war rested had turned against its army.

Crossing the Yellow River

Since June 1938, when Chinese soldiers breached the dyke at Huayuankou, the Yellow River had flowed east of Zhengzhou along a new course and through vast floodlands, which had divided the front in Henan ever since. On the southern bank the Japanese held only a small bridgehead by the destroyed railway bridge of the Beijing–Hankou line. From the end of 1943 their engineers had been rebuilding the bridge with stocks of material brought from Manchuria, and by the end of March 1944 trains were running across it again. On 14 April the units of the Twelfth Army began crossing the river: the 37th, 62nd and 110th Infantry Divisions, the 7th Independent Mixed Brigade, the 4th Cavalry Brigade and the 3rd Tank Division. The whole operation was directed by the headquarters of General Yasuji Okamura’s North China Area Army.

The attack proper began on the night of 17–18 April. According to Japanese studies, a detachment of the 227th Regiment crossed the new channel near Zhongmou, east of Zhengzhou, and came out in the rear of the Chinese defences. By 18 April the Chinese line on the river had been broken; on the morning of 19 April the Japanese entered Zhengzhou, and on 20 April the main body of the Twelfth Army attacked the Chinese 85th Army defending the hills at Bawangcheng, near the bridge. The Chinese positions, for six years regarded as safely behind the river barrier, could not withstand an attack by tanks supported by aircraft, whose superiority was, according to Japanese figures, overwhelming – in the whole Henan campaign the Japanese flew some 2,700 combat sorties and the Chinese about 400.

Chiang Kai-shek meant to repeat the method that had worked earlier at Changsha: to let the Japanese approach a fortified city stocked for several weeks – this time Luoyang – and then strike at their extended flanks. The war area commander, General Jiang Dingwen, later claimed that he had asked for permission to counter-attack as early as 23 and 24 April but received it only on 1 May, when it was too late. Communications between headquarters were poor, orders arrived late and reserves were sent to the wrong places. Instead of heading straight for Luoyang, the Japanese turned south along the railway to encircle and destroy the Chinese armies in the field.

The collapse of the front in Henan

Over the following weeks the 1st War Area fell apart. On 30 April the 37th Division attacked Xuchang, which Chiang had ordered to be held to the last; the city fell on 1 May, and the commander of its defence, General Lü Gongliang of the New 29th Division, was killed. Tang Enbo’s armies, which tried to come to its relief, were smashed in the field in the first days of May, and their commander lost control of his units. On 9 May Japanese columns from the north and south met on the railway, and the whole line from Beijing to Wuhan was in Japanese hands. The Japanese surrounded Luoyang in mid-May and took it on 25 May; General Li Jiayu, commander of the 36th Army Group, was killed in the retreat. The pursuit reached as far as the Tongguan Pass on the border of Shaanxi.

The losses of both sides are known only approximately. Tang Enbo reported that the two army groups under his command had lost more than 58,000 killed, wounded and missing, and the total losses of the 1st War Area are estimated at about 100,000. The Japanese official history gives, up to the capture of Luoyang, some 37,500 Chinese killed and 15,000 taken prisoner, and about 850 Japanese killed and 2,500 wounded. Theodore White wrote that within three weeks “a Chinese army of 300,000 men had ceased to exist”, and American reports spoke of “token resistance”. Chinese sources reproached Tang Enbo for losing several dozen towns in little more than a month.

Place in the war

Henan was only the beginning. On 27 May Lieutenant General Isamu Yokoyama’s Eleventh Army set off south from Wuhan, opening the Togo phase: Changsha, which the Chinese had defended successfully in 1939–1942, fell on 18 June, and Hengyang, defended by General Fang Xianjue’s 10th Army, held out under siege until 8 August. In the autumn the Japanese entered Guangxi, in November they took Guilin, Liuzhou and Nanning, and in December they linked up with troops advancing from Indochina. One by one the Americans lost the Fourteenth Air Force’s forward airfields. B-29 bombers from the bases around Chengdu carried out their first raid on Japan on 15 June 1944, but the difficulty of supplying them over the Himalayas and the threat posed by Ichi-gō meant that they were soon moved to the Marianas.

The defeat in Henan opened the last act of the conflict between Chiang and Stilwell. Washington demanded that the American be given command of all Chinese forces; Chiang refused, and in October 1944 Roosevelt recalled Stilwell. According to estimates cited in the literature, China lost up to 750,000 soldiers in the whole operation, counting those who simply melted away. Japan achieved its territorial objectives but never managed to use the overland corridor to move raw materials, and the airfields were rebuilt further west. The most lasting effect of the operation proved to be the weakening of the Kuomintang government’s army and authority, and the growing American conviction that Mao Zedong’s Chinese Communists were a serious force. In the spring of 1944 Japan struck in two places in Asia at once: in China and – in Operation U-Go – at Imphal and Kohima in India. At Imphal it suffered defeat; in China it won one of the last great land victories of the war – a victory that could no longer change its position.