The Zhejiang–Jiangxi campaign

At the end of May 1942 Japanese troops, who had set out two weeks earlier from the areas of Hangzhou and Ningbo, overran the central part of Zhejiang province south of Shanghai. On 28 May they took Jinhua, an important railway junction, and nearby Lanxi, and in the following days they regrouped for an advance on Quzhou, the site of one of the most important Chinese airfields. Under 29 May popular war chronologies note briefly: “great successes of Japanese troops south of Shanghai”. Behind this lay an operation that the Japanese called Sekkan sakusen, the Zhejiang–Jiangxi operation, whose main aim was to destroy the airfields on which the airmen of the Doolittle Raid were to have landed. The campaign lasted until September and went down in history less for the fighting than for the mass crimes against the civilian population and the use of biological weapons.

Revenge for the raid on Tokyo

On 18 April 1942 sixteen American B-25 bombers under Lieutenant Colonel Jimmy Doolittle bombed Tokyo and other Japanese cities and then flew on to China. According to plan they were to land at airfields in eastern China, above all at Quzhou, but because of the premature take-off and the onset of night not a single aircraft got there. Fifteen crews bailed out or crash-landed over Zhejiang and Jiangxi and off the coast; the sixteenth landed in the USSR. Most of the airmen were led to safety by Chinese peasants, guerrillas, soldiers and missionaries; eight fell into Japanese hands.

The Japanese command had been aware of the threat posed by the airfields of eastern China even before the raid, and the raid turned this concern into an urgent need. On 21 April Imperial General Headquarters demanded from the China Expeditionary Army, commanded by General Shunroku Hata, an operation against the airfields in Zhejiang as a matter of “extreme urgency”. For this purpose the 13th Army in Shanghai had to cancel another offensive it had already prepared. On 30 April an order from Imperial General Headquarters directed it to “defeat the enemy in Zhejiang province, destroy his principal air bases and frustrate his intention of using this area to bomb the Empire”. The operation was initially named “Se” (Se-gō sakusen; often rendered “Sei-go” in English-language literature), and when it was extended to the neighbouring province of Jiangxi, the name Sekkan, from the first characters of the names of the two provinces, came into use.

Hata and the commander of the 13th Army, General Shigeru Sawada, concluded that merely destroying the airfields would not be enough, as the Chinese would quickly rebuild them. They decided to defeat the forces of General Gu Zhutong’s Chinese 3rd War Area, which was defending the region, and considerably increased the forces committed. According to Chinese studies based on the Japanese official history, the 13th Army put some 68,000 men into the operation, and General Korechika Anami’s 11th Army, which was to strike from the west, from the direction of Nanchang, some 25,000. They were supported by the Japanese 1st Air Division, which from 29 April bombed the airfields at Quzhou, Lishui, Yushan and elsewhere. Chiang Kai-shek’s government reinforced the 3rd War Area with two elite armies brought in from the neighbouring 9th War Area.

The advance on Jinhua

On the night of 14/15 May units of the 13th Army advanced in several columns on a front some 150 kilometres long, from Fenghua near Ningbo to Fuyang on the Fuchun river, towards Jinhua and the Zhejiang–Jiangxi railway. The 70th and 22nd Divisions advanced from the east, through Shaoxing and Shangyu; the 15th Division and mixed brigades through the centre, along the railway, through Zhuji and Yiwu; and the 116th and 32nd Divisions from the north, along the Fuchun valley. The Chinese front-line units, largely poorly armed, resisted in prepared positions and then withdrew in order to attack from the flanks and rear.

On the Chinese side there was disagreement from the outset over how to conduct the defence. The command of the 3rd War Area wanted to fight a decisive battle at Jinhua and Lanxi, but on 17 May the Military Commission in Chongqing ordered it to husband its main forces and to accept a decisive battle only at Quzhou. Jinhua and Lanxi were therefore defended by single divisions. From the evening of 25 May the Chinese 79th Division fought for three days in and around Jinhua against the Japanese 70th Division; on the morning of 28 May the Japanese broke into the city, and after several hours of street fighting the defenders withdrew into the mountains to the north. The same day the 15th Division took Lanxi. Near that town its commander, Lieutenant General Naoji Sakai, rode his horse onto a mine and was killed. According to Japanese studies, he was the first divisional commander in the history of the modern Japanese army to be killed while in command of his division.

On 29 May the Japanese took further places north of the railway and brought up forces to Longyou, in preparation for a blow against Quzhou. On 31 May the 11th Army joined the operation: during the night it crossed the Fu river east of Nanchang and advanced eastwards along the railway to meet the 13th Army.

Quzhou and further fighting

The attack on Quzhou began on 3 June. The Military Commission changed its mind again and on 4 June ordered that a decisive battle be avoided, so as not to lose the army. After three days of fighting in torrential rain, on 6 June the Japanese took the airfield and the flying school at Quzhou, and soon afterwards the town. In the following days Yushan (12 June), Guangfeng and Shangrao, until then the seat of the 3rd War Area’s headquarters (14 June), fell. Meanwhile the 11th Army took Fuzhou, Jianchang, Yingtan and Guixi. On 24 June the 13th Army captured Lishui, and on 1 July the two armies met at Hengfeng, gaining control of the whole railway line between Hangzhou and Nanchang. On 12 July the Japanese also took the port of Wenzhou.

In the occupied area Japanese engineers systematically destroyed the airfields: they cut trenches across the runways, blew them up and filled them in, and they carried off the rails and equipment of the Zhejiang–Jiangxi railway. Raw materials were also removed, especially fluorite, which the General Staff in Tokyo had expressly demanded.

Crimes against the population

From the outset the campaign was punitive in character. Japanese soldiers searched for the American airmen and the people who had helped them, and whole villages and small towns suspected of having sheltered them were burned and their inhabitants killed. Chiang Kai-shek, in a cable to Washington, wrote that Japanese troops had slaughtered “every man, woman and child” in those areas. Detailed accounts were left by Western missionaries who had remained in the region: they described the town of Nancheng in Jiangxi razed to the ground, the murder of orphans and old people from the mission at Yihuang, people tied to stakes and burned alive, and children thrown into wells. The places where Doolittle’s airmen had landed suffered particularly; according to accounts collected by missionaries, in one village a man who had given hospitality to an American was wrapped in a kerosene-soaked blanket and set alight in front of his family.

The number of victims is not known and is disputed. Claire Chennault, commander of the American air force in China, wrote in his post-war memoirs of 250,000 soldiers and civilians killed during the three months of the campaign; the same figure was given in 1943 by the American missionary Vincent Smith, and following them it is cited by some American historians, among them James M. Scott and Richard Frank. Chinese local figures are lower, but still horrifying: according to the war history of the Republic of China, more than 20,000 civilians were murdered in the Quzhou district alone and 30,000 were abducted or went missing, while the post-war loss registers of Zhejiang province list for 1942 at least 66,500 civilians killed, wounded and missing. Depending on the source and the method of counting, the victims are thus estimated at anywhere from several tens of thousands to 250,000 people, most of them civilians.

Biological weapons

Alongside the ground operation, General Shirō Ishii’s Unit 731, which dealt with biological weapons, was at work together with a similar unit from Nanjing. The region had already been the target of such attacks: in October 1940 Japanese aircraft had dropped fleas infected with plague on Ningbo and Quzhou. In 1942, according to testimony given after the war by members of the unit – among other places before the Soviet court at Khabarovsk in 1949 – and according to the findings of historians such as Sheldon Harris, the germs of cholera, typhoid and paratyphoid, dysentery, plague and anthrax were spread in wells, rivers and food, mainly during the Japanese withdrawal, in the areas of Yushan, Jinhua and Guangxin.

The weapon proved unpredictable. According to the testimony of a Japanese prisoner interrogated by the Americans in 1944, Japanese units entered the contaminated areas and more than 10,000 soldiers fell ill, of whom, according to documents he had seen, more than 1,700 died, mainly of cholera; the prisoner himself believed the real losses were higher. The number of Chinese victims of the epidemics, which dragged on in the region for years, cannot be established. According to Chinese sources the Japanese also used poison gas during the campaign, among other places near Quzhou.

The withdrawal

On 28 July Imperial General Headquarters ordered the operation to be ended. The Japanese were to keep only the Jinhua area and to evacuate the rest of the occupied territory in mid-August. The withdrawal began on 19 August and lasted until the end of September. Chinese units followed the retreating troops and by the end of September had recovered almost the whole railway line except for the areas around Jinhua and Yiwu. The Japanese left behind them burned towns and villages, wrecked airfields, contaminated wells and epidemics.

Significance

Militarily the Japanese achieved their aim only for a time. The airfields of eastern China were put out of action, and the 3rd War Area suffered heavy losses, but it was not destroyed. The campaign absorbed forces that the China Expeditionary Army had intended to use for a planned offensive against Sichuan and Chongqing; preparations for it were delayed, and in December 1942, in view of the demands of the fighting on Guadalcanal, the operation was cancelled. The airfields were rebuilt, and the American air force in China grew in strength. In 1944, when B-29 bombers began to take off for Japan from bases in the Chengdu area, the Japanese army carried out the even larger Operation Ichi-Go, once again largely in order to deprive the Americans of their airfields in China.

The Zhejiang–Jiangxi campaign also showed how high a price the Chinese paid for taking part in a coalition war. The Doolittle Raid raised American spirits, and its cost was borne by the inhabitants of eastern China. Chiang Kai-shek, who had reluctantly agreed to the use of his airfields and had feared reprisals from the start, took it bitterly, which further strained his already tense relations with General Joseph Stilwell, sent to China in February as his chief of staff. The crimes of 1942, and especially the activities of Unit 731, long remained in the shadows: after the war the Americans granted Ishii and his men immunity in exchange for the results of their research, and for decades the Japanese authorities did not admit to having waged biological warfare.