The Suiyuan campaign

During the night of 14–15 November 1936 the advance units of the so-called Grand Han Righteous Army (Dahan Yijun), a collaborationist force armed and led by Japanese officers, clashed with Chinese patrols near Hongort (Chinese: Honggertu), a settlement on the eastern edge of Suiyuan province, on the steppes of present-day Inner Mongolia. On the morning of 15 November about 1,500 men, supported by four aircraft and six guns, attacked the settlement. It was defended by a garrison made up of several cavalry squadrons and a local self-defence force. So began the campaign that the Japanese called the “Suiyuan incident” and the Chinese the “Suiyuan war of resistance”. Five weeks later it ended in defeat for the attackers – regarded in China as the first clear victory over Japanese-led forces – and set off a wave of enthusiasm across China that a month later found its echo in Xi’an.

Many accounts state that Hongort was attacked by Japanese-backed Mongol troops. This is a simplification. At Hongort the fighting was done by the Grand Han Righteous Army, a motley collection of Chinese irregulars, many of them former bandits, commanded by a former officer, Wang Ying. The Mongol army of Prince Demchugdongrub operated on other sectors and defended the base at Bailingmiao. The whole, however, was a single operation, prepared and directed by the Kwantung Army.

Japan’s policy of “detaching” northern China

After the Tanggu Truce of May 1933 the Kwantung Army did not stop at the Great Wall. Instead of open war, it pursued a policy of “autonomy” in northern China: it forced the Chinese to withdraw their troops, backed local leaders willing to break with Nanjing and created zones dependent on Japan. In June 1935 two agreements – between General He Yingqin and General Yoshijirō Umezu, and between General Qin Dechun and Colonel Kenji Doihara – removed government troops and Kuomintang structures from Hebei province and from the eastern part of Chahar. In November 1935 a puppet “autonomous” administration was set up in eastern Hebei.

In the west the Japanese played the Mongol card. Prince Demchugdongrub, known to the Chinese as De Wang, leader of the Mongols of the Xilin Gol League, had since 1933 been demanding from Nanjing autonomy for Inner Mongolia, where Chinese settlers had for decades been pushing the nomads off their pastures. The Chinese government agreed to an autonomy commission but gave it no real power. De Wang therefore turned to the Japanese, who promised him weapons and money. In December 1935 the troops of Li Shouxin, a Mongol commander in the service of Manchukuo, supported by Japanese aircraft, occupied northern Chahar. On 12 May 1936 a Mongol Military Government was set up in Dehua (today Huade), in which De Wang commanded the army while Japanese advisers actually governed. He hoped for the rebirth of the Mongol state of the days of Genghis Khan. The Kwantung Army saw him as a tool: a buffer statelet between China, the Mongolian People’s Republic and the USSR, and a route to the seizure of Suiyuan, through which ran the railway from Beijing to Baotou.

From March 1936 the Kwantung Army’s chief of staff was Seishirō Itagaki, one of the architects of the seizure of Manchuria. The operation was prepared by the head of the Japanese special mission in Dehua, Lieutenant Colonel Ryūkichi Tanaka. The Governor of Suiyuan, General Fu Zuoyi, a subordinate of the Shanxi warlord Yan Xishan, was first offered bribes and then threatened. Within the General Staff in Tokyo, Kanji Ishiwara protested against the whole venture, fearing that an adventure in Mongolia would drag Japan into a war with China before the army was ready for one. When he came to Manchuria, the Kwantung Army officers reportedly replied that they were only doing what he himself had done in 1931.

Forces and plan

The Mongol army numbered about 10,000 men in eight poorly armed cavalry divisions. Li Shouxin’s troops were better trained and armed. Wang Ying’s Grand Han Righteous Army, estimated at 5,000–6,000 men, was the weakest. The Japanese supplied weapons, artillery, armoured cars and aircraft and attached advisers to every unit, several dozen in all, and Wang Ying’s army was in practice directed by a retired Japanese colonel. Under the plan adopted in Dehua on 5 November, Wang Ying was to take Hongort and advance on the provincial capital, Guisui (today Hohhot), while a thrust on Baotou was to be launched from Bailingmiao, a monastery and centre of the Mongol autonomy movement in northern Suiyuan. On the same day De Wang announced that he was declaring war on Fu Zuoyi.

The Chinese were prepared. As early as the beginning of August 1936 the Hongort garrison had beaten off an attack by a smaller collaborationist detachment. Chiang Kai-shek, although he still gave priority to fighting the communists, sent anti-aircraft artillery battalions and government divisions north, and Yan Xishan placed his forces in Suiyuan and northern Shanxi under Fu Zuoyi’s command. In all, several tens of thousands of soldiers stood on the Chinese side, though only some of them went into action.

Hongort and Bailingmiao

Between 15 and 17 November Wang Ying’s troops, directed personally by Tanaka and supported by aircraft, stormed the walls of Hongort several times, each time without success. Fu Zuoyi came to the front and decided not to wait. During the night of 17–18 November General Peng Yubin’s cavalry and Dong Qiwu’s infantry brigade, after a forced night march, struck the besiegers’ rear and flanks. By morning the Grand Han Righteous Army had fled north. According to Chinese figures, it lost more than a thousand men killed, wounded and captured at Hongort.

Fu Zuoyi now decided to strike at Bailingmiao, which was ringed by hills and fortified, with large stocks of weapons, ammunition and flour. It was defended by about 3,000 Mongol soldiers and several dozen Japanese advisers. On the evening of 23 November, in freezing cold, Chinese columns of infantry, cavalry, artillery and armoured cars approached the defenders’ positions. The fighting went on all night. In the morning, when the attack stalled, the Chinese sent lorries carrying infantry and armoured cars into the pass under cover of concentrated artillery fire. At around 9.30 a.m. on 24 November Bailingmiao was in their hands. The Japanese advisers and the commander of the Mongol 7th Division escaped by car. The casualty figures given by Chinese sources vary: the Mongols lost between 300 and 800 killed and 200–300 taken prisoner, the Chinese about 300 killed and wounded. Artillery, machine guns, radio sets, hundreds of drums of petrol and 20,000 sacks of flour were captured.

Japanese aircraft bombed Bailingmiao, and on 3 December about a thousand of Wang Ying’s men tried to retake it. They ran into an ambush and were routed, and their commander, Lei Zhongtian, was killed. The campaign ended with the disintegration of the attackers’ ranks. On 8 and 9 December two brigades of the Grand Han Righteous Army at Xilamuren (Shilamuren) went over to the Chinese and massacred their Japanese advisers – 29 people, according to Chinese sources, among them the chief adviser to Wang Ying. The remnants of Wang Ying’s force were destroyed, and the Mongol army withdrew to northern Chahar.

Who fought in Suiyuan

Tokyo denied having anything to do with the campaign. On 21 November the Japanese Foreign Ministry stated unofficially that it was an internal Chinese matter, and the Foreign Minister, Hachirō Arita, insisted that Japan was not involved in the conflict at all. The captured vehicles, guns and documents told a different story. On 27 November, moreover, the Kwantung Army, together with the authorities of Manchukuo, announced that it could not remain indifferent to events threatening Manchukuo and that, in the name of the fight against communism, it had a “vital interest” in the situation in Inner Mongolia. Japan was thus speaking with two voices: that of its diplomats and that of an army pursuing its own policy. The Chinese took this as proof that talks with Tokyo were pointless. The negotiations conducted in Nanjing since September between Ambassador Shigeru Kawagoe and Foreign Minister Zhang Qun, in which the Japanese demanded joint “defence against communism” and a special status for northern China, broke down for good.

Significance

Japanese ground forces took no direct part in the campaign – only airmen and advisers fought – but in China and abroad it was widely regarded as a Japanese defeat. In China Bailingmiao became a symbol. Newspapers printed special editions, and from all over the country came collections of money, warm clothing and delegations for the defenders. Fu Zuoyi became a national hero. On 30 November Chiang Kai-shek called the recapture of Bailingmiao “the starting point of the nation’s revival”, and on 1 December the communists called on the government to end the civil war and defend Suiyuan together. For many Chinese – including the troops of Zhang Xueliang, who in Shaanxi had to pursue the communists instead of fighting the Japanese – Suiyuan was proof that Japan could be beaten, and an argument against the policy of “first internal pacification, then resistance to the external enemy”. When on 12 December 1936 Zhang Xueliang and Yang Hucheng arrested Chiang in Xi’an (the Xi’an incident), one of their demands was the uniting of the country to fight Japan.

On the Japanese side, the defeat did not make anyone more cautious. According to Chinese sources, the Kwantung Army was preparing a counter-offensive, which was abandoned only after the events in Xi’an. It rebuilt the Mongol army, which by the summer of 1937 numbered about 20,000 men, and treated Suiyuan as a matter postponed rather than closed. On 25 November 1936, the day after the fall of Bailingmiao, Japan signed the Anti-Comintern Pact with Germany, and the slogan of “defence against communism” became the official justification for its actions in northern China. When the Second Sino-Japanese War broke out in July 1937, Kwantung Army troops under its new chief of staff, General Hideki Tōjō, together with De Wang’s forces, occupied Chahar in August and Guisui and Baotou in October. On the lands that had not been conquered in 1936, puppet governments were set up, out of which grew the state of Mengjiang.