Raids on Chongqing in August 1941

In August 1941 the Japanese air campaign against Chongqing reached its peak. From 8 to 14 August bombers came over the city for a whole week, by day and by night, in small groups, one after another. According to Chinese records, thirteen air-raid alerts were sounded in the city between 10 and 13 August, and people spent a total of about 96 hours in the shelters. The Japanese no longer counted on destroying particular targets. They wanted to exhaust the city, to rob its inhabitants of sleep and work and the government of Chiang Kai-shek of its ability to function. The Chinese called this tactic “fatigue bombing” (疲劳轰炸).

War chronologies usually record under 11 August that Chongqing, the “nominal capital” of Nationalist China, was heavily bombed for several days. The first part of this statement is inaccurate. Chongqing was not a capital in name only. The government of the Republic of China announced the transfer of its seat there in the autumn of 1937; after the fall of Wuhan in 1938 all the most important government offices operated there, and from September 1940 the city officially bore the title of “auxiliary capital” (陪都). It was the real capital of wartime China, with the ministries, the parliament, Chiang’s headquarters and the foreign embassies.

Operation 102

Raids on Chongqing had continued intermittently since 1938, and their heaviest phase had been Operation 101 in the summer of 1940, part of the bombing of Chongqing. In 1941 Japan tried once more. Relations with Washington were deteriorating, and Tokyo concluded that the war in China had to be ended while the armed forces still had forces to spare. Naval aviation resumed the raids on 3 May and by mid-July had carried out 22 strikes deep into China. On 5 June, during a night raid, between several hundred and several thousand people, depending on the source, suffocated or were crushed to death in an overcrowded tunnel shelter in the city centre.

In July the army and navy staffs agreed a joint plan. It was called Operation 102 (百二号作戦). In June and July the raids were to be carried out mainly by the navy, and from the beginning of August army aviation was to join in. The army divided its operations into three stages. First it was to strike towns and communication hubs at medium range, then airfields deep inland and the salt works at Zigong – for without salt, it was reckoned, Sichuan would begin to starve – and finally Chongqing itself, without respite. The navy transferred the main body of the 11th Air Fleet to China, some 180 land-based bombers, and planned a three-month offensive from 28 July. Alongside the older Mitsubishi G3M flew the new Mitsubishi G4M, which was undergoing its combat trials over Sichuan. The army sent Ki-21 heavy bombers from airfields around Hankou.

In the very first days of the operation an incident showed how close the targets in Chongqing lay to world politics. On 30 July Japanese bombs fell right beside the American gunboat USS Tutuila, anchored on the Yangtze. Tokyo quickly apologised, but the incident came a few days after the United States had frozen Japanese assets in response to the occupation of southern Indochina.

A week without sleep

August brought a new tactic. Instead of a few big raids a day, the Japanese sent small groups of two or three aircraft over the city at intervals of an hour or two. No sooner had one alert been called off than the next was sounded. Moonlit nights favoured them, when the bombers could see the blacked-out city. Memoirs of those days repeat the same words: exhaustion, nerves stretched to breaking point, people who would rather stay at home and risk death than go down yet again into a stifling shelter. Soong Mei-ling, Chiang’s wife, wrote that the extreme fatigue “penetrates the nerves and the marrow of the bones”. Shops, offices and schools nevertheless kept working, moving their work into the hours between raids, while air-raid teams put out fires and dug through the ruins.

The city was better prepared for such a life than a year earlier. According to Chinese figures, by February 1941, 441 public shelters for about 190,000 people and more than 540 private ones for over 120,000 had been cut into the rock. A network of observers and telephones gave warning of approaching aircraft, and signal balls and flags were hoisted on the hills. Yet the real defence remained the rock, not the air force. After its defeats in clashes with Mitsubishi A6M Zero fighters, the Chinese air force avoided combat, and deliveries of aircraft from the USSR, its main source since 1937, had ceased after the German attack on the Soviet Union.

On 11 August Zero fighters escorting Japanese bombers swept over the airfields between Chongqing and Chengdu. Near Chengdu they ran into Chinese I-153 biplanes and I-16 monoplanes that had managed to get airborne. Among the Japanese pilots was the future ace Saburō Sakai, who later described a long duel with one of the Chinese airmen. According to Chinese accounts, four Chinese pilots were killed in this fight. According to some studies, it was the last recorded combat between Chinese fighters and navy Zeros before those units were withdrawn from China as part of the preparations for the Pacific War.

A blow at Chiang’s residence

The most notorious raid of that summer came at the end of the month. Japanese intelligence learned that on 30 August Chiang Kai-shek was holding a military conference at his residence in the Huangshan hills, on the south bank of the Yangtze, away from the city centre. According to Chinese studies, the Japanese learned the location of the residence from information supplied by an Italian diplomat, and the date of the conference from decrypted Chinese signals. The raid was led in person by Major General Saburō Endō, commander of the army’s 3rd Air Brigade, who took a seat in the aircraft of one of the squadron commanders.

The alert sounded at half past nine in the morning. Before noon a second wave of bombers came over the city and began a targeted bombing of the residence. Chiang went down into a shelter cut into the rock. His wife was reading at the tunnel entrance when the raid began. According to Chiang’s notes, she reached cover in the last seconds, “only three steps” from where the bomb exploded, and she later kept the torn French dictionary she had been holding as a memento. The bombs buried the entrances to the shelter, but the rock held. Two guards were killed and four seriously wounded. Chiang noted in his diary that the sight of the wounded was “unbearable”, and wrote of the suffering of people who had endured raids day and night for four years. The Japanese combat report spoke of “great damage” and an “enormous threat” to Chongqing’s leaders. Some studies give a figure of more than two hundred aircraft used that day, but Japanese sources do not confirm it.

Endō himself judged the day differently. That evening he wrote in his diary that Chongqing was “still not a dead city” and that the wish to force it to surrender by bombs alone was “fundamentally mistaken”. He cited the example of London, which thousands of German bombers had failed to break during the Blitz.

The Americans on their way

While bombs were falling on Chongqing, help was being prepared on the other side of the mountains. The American airman Claire Chennault, Chiang’s aviation adviser since 1937, had spent the winter of 1940–1941 in Washington and won approval for the purchase of a hundred Curtiss P-40 fighters and the recruitment of about a hundred pilots and two hundred mechanics from among the men of the US Army Air Corps, Navy and Marine Corps. Formally they were civilian employees of a private company; in practice they acted with the knowledge and consent of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The first group, about three hundred men, sailed from San Francisco on 10 July 1941 aboard a Dutch ship and reached Rangoon on 28 July. According to most studies, on 1 August Chiang issued an order formally creating the American Volunteer Group (AVG) as a unit of the Chinese air force. Through August and the following months its pilots trained at a British airfield near Toungoo in Burma. The world later came to know them as the Flying Tigers. They went into action only on 20 December 1941, after the outbreak of the Pacific War.

At the same time Washington was hardening its line towards Tokyo. On 1 August the United States in effect stopped selling oil to Japan, and Roosevelt and Churchill discussed a joint warning to Japan at the meeting that produced the Atlantic Charter. At the end of August Roosevelt announced that an American military mission would be sent to China to oversee supplies under Lend-Lease, which had been extended to China in May.

Place in the war

Operation 102 did not break Chongqing. The navy ended its part on 31 August with a last long-range raid on the airfields at Xichang and Zhaotong. Cut off from American oil, it had to save fuel, and its bombers and fighters were needed for the preparations for war with the United States, Britain and the Netherlands. On 3 September General Endō submitted to his superiors a memorandum on the “futility” of further bombing. He wrote that reports of Chongqing’s destruction were exaggerated, that the city was growing around its burnt-out old centre, and that the Chinese air force hid from every attack. A few days later the command of the Japanese army in China halted the large raids on the interior. The bombing of Chongqing continued sporadically until 1943, but never again on such a scale.

The toll of 1941 is reckoned in different ways. Chinese compilations speak of several dozen raids on the city itself over the whole operation, about 2,500 killed and more than 7,500 wounded, and several thousand houses destroyed, although these figures differ from one study to another. The most tragic day remained 5 June, the day of the tunnel disaster.

August 1941 was the last month in which Japan tried to force China to capitulate from the air. A few months later its aircraft attacked Pearl Harbor, and China became one of the great powers of the anti-Hitler coalition. Chongqing, which had survived three years of bombing, remained the seat of Chiang’s government until the end of the war. The experience of its inhabitants, who for weeks on end lived between the shelter and the ruins, foreshadowed the fate of many European and Japanese cities in 1943–1945.