The nature of the China theatre between 1939 and 1945 was dominated by the fact that in 1937 and 1938 the Japanese overran virtually the whole of China that was worth occupying and, apart from a series of coastal operations in the south in 1941, thereafter their basic stance in China was defensive. This left three main parties to struggle for power in China. The Kuomintang (KMT) regime of Chiang Kai-shek, the communists of Mao Tse-tung, and the Japanese. Without the means to bring the KMT regime to the peace table by further military victories, the Japanese were to be led into Indo-China, and thence into the Pacific war, in their attempt to ensure the isolation of Chungking, yet at the same time the Japanese authorities would not invest the puppet regime at Nanking (nor its Peking rival) with power sufficient to allow it to present itself as a credible alternative to the Kuomintang. For its part, the latter increasingly adopted a passive policy towards the Japanese forces of occupation to the extent that American liaison teams coming to China before the outbreak of the Pacific war were shocked to find that ‘special undeclared peace’ prevailed in much of the country and that a flourishing trade existed across no-man’s land: indeed, it was one standing American grievance that throughout the war the Japanese outbid the United States for Kuomintang-supplied tungsten.
KMT acquiescence in Japanese occupation of much of China was primarily the result of Chiang’s calculation that Japan’s ultimate defeat was assured and that the Japanese would be forced to relinquish their holdings in China by the Allies. Moreover, KMT strength had to be preserved in readiness for a resumption of the struggle with the Communists. Communist policy was no more than a mirror image of that of Chungking. The co-operation between the two factions established as a result of the Sian Incident was little more than nominal: the period between 1940 and 1945 was marked by many clashes between the Communists and the KMT. These soon badly compromised Communist offensive power and forced the Communists to attempt to reconsolidate their position in Yenan rather than actively pursue operations against either of their enemies.
The limited offensive power of all three parties in effect led to the observation of de-facto truces between the Japanese and each of the Chinese factions, though these were punctuated by periodic rice raids and by a series of ferocious pacification operations in which the Japanese adopted policies of widespread slaughter and destruction. But the main threat of these various accommodations was presented by the American determination to develop China as an active theatre of military and air operations as a complement to the US naval and amphibious efforts in the Pacific. A Chinese army of 90 divisions was raised for large-scale offensive operations and air bases developed in south-east China for a bombing campaign of the Japanese Home Islands.
Practical difficulties of supplying China from India on the scale needed to realize these intentions, and Chungking’s procrastination in meeting American expectations, ultimately led to the trimming of American aims with the result that the strategic air offensive came to represent the main American undertaking. In the event, however, this policy produced the very situation that the air effort was supposed to forestall: a general Japanese offensive (Operation Ichi-Go) throughout southern China aimed at eliminating the air bases from which the US bombers were to attack Japan.
This Japanese effort, the last major Japanese offensive effort of the war, began in April 1944 with the clearing of that part of Honan that had remained in KMT hands since 1938: the collapse of KMT resistance in the province led to massacres of fleeing nationalist troops by an enraged and deserted peasantry. Thereafter the main Japanese effort across the middle Yangtze began on 27 May and over the next six months various converging Japanese offensives slowly resulted in linking up existing holdings. By late November, the Japanese were able to claim the establishment of uninterrupted overland communications between Singapore and Manchuria: the elimination of US air bases throughout southern China was all but completed at the same time. However, the decision to capture the Marianas had freed the Americans of the need for air bases in China, and whatever gains the Japanese had made were illusory. By spring of 1945, the Japanese had begun to withdraw from their recent conquests as a result of belated awareness of over-extension and the need to consolidate their positions in northern China and Manchuria: as they did so they were followed, usually at a respectful distance, by KMT and Communist forces seeking to steal a march on one another in anticipation of the resumption of the “real” war.
Re: The Forgotten War
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