Second Sino-Japanese War 1937-1945

[Turin]

Well for those of you who know only a little about this not so well know war. it was fought between the Imperial Japanese and both the Nationalist and Communist Chinese.

Before I get started I have to refute a few myths:

1. The Japanese were not better equipped than the Chinese. At the wars onset, the Nationalist forces were equipped mostly with German weaponry and equipment including armored vehicles. 3 divisions were trained entirely by German officers. On paper is was the best and biggest army in the Far East. When the British and the Americans entered the war, the Nationalists were constantly supplied with Allied weaponry and equipment.

2. The Japanese never intended to conquer all of China. They knew that such a plan was impossible to achieve and even more so to maintain. Indefinite occupation was out of the question entirely.

So why did the Chinese lose so badly? Despite all their on paper advantages: equipment, manpower, terrain, and the preoccupation of the enemy in the Pacific, the Chinese were never able to take a single city back from the Japanese on any occasion.

I mention this because such a war is uncommon to say the least.

One cannot simply brush it off by saying the Chinese are naturally bad at war because only 5 years later the Communist Chinese would drive the most advanced army in the world on the longest land retreat in American military.

[Turin]

Actually, by 1943, the situation in the air had changed. From the beginning the Chinese air force had been avoiding confrontation with the Japanese. They engaged only when the odds strongly favored them.

One example is during the air raids against Nanking where the Chinese circled above the Japanese fighters bombers while they pounded the city. Only then did they dive down to engage planes that were already low on fuel and ammunition.

By 1943, Allied airfields and the preoccupation of Japanese air power in the Pacific allowed the Chinese an open air window.

As for tactics, the Japanese infantry tactics were atrocious. Most officers were still partial to old school Prussian tactics of mass infantry charges.

As for morale, how poor can the morale of an army that is defending it's own soil be?

The situation in this case is much like that of the Russians in WWII. Yet the Russians were quick to go on the counteroffensive, while the Chinese never tried it seems.

[Del Arroyo]

My instinct would be this-- given a situation where you had two armies, equipped rougly equally, using roughly the same (human wave) tactics, the fiercer, more determined, better organized army will win. Thus, the Japanese beat the Chinese.

But when the Japanese faced the Americans they got slaughtered, not primarily because of inferior equipment, but rather due to their very very poor tactics. If the Americans had been equipped like the Chinese, the Japanese would have had some chance, but this was simply not the case. Thus the embarrassingly one-sided nature of nearly all engagements between US and Japanese forces.

DA

[nokhor]

i think the vision thing was a huge factor. except for the commanders with special access to outside supplies like the whampoa clique, most chinese divisions were underquipped peasent conscripts from former warlord forces. the KMT was still using the age old tactic of tying the consripts together in a line during a battle so they wouldn't run away. the japanese had the racial superiority ideology thing going, the communists had the universalist ideology thing going and the KMT was too fractured and was hamstrung by its own internal divisions to be capable of any effective resistance. and i don't think chiang was a bad commander, far from it; but not even sun tzu could have managed a victory with the mess that was the Nationalist forces.

[Kraxis]

The Japanese human wave tactics were actually very good in the environment they chose, the jungle and forests. There it is hard to get support weapons to work properly.
Need I say Malaya and Singapore? Or even the Phillippines.
In both cases the enemies were perhaps not superbly armed, but they were in general better equipped than their Japanese opponents.

New Guinea was also a good case where the Japanese ran out of supplies and troops really. They didn't lose because the tactics were bad per se there.

In the open of the hills of Guadalcanal and Bougainville it was costly and not a good choice. The same can be said of the flattened atolls.

[Turin]

But the Chinese had numbers and "home field" advantage right?

The reason why I ask is that recently I was reading over a book that told the war from the better documented Japanese perspective.

The Japanese never dreamed that they would have the level of success they did in China. They were pushed to go farther West only as each successive victory came more easily than they had imagined.

Even the Japanese overestimated the Chinese it would seem.

But then how was it that such a poor military could drive back the US Army, Marines and UN forces just 5 years later with even more inferior weaponry?

IMHO this is one of the most radical turn-arounds in world history. And it really gives insight to the age old question of what determines military strength. From the Chinese experiment it would seem that equipment has little to do with it.

[Mouzafphaerre]

.

But then how was it that such a poor military could drive back the US Army, Marines and UN forces just 5 years later with even more inferior weaponry?

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

СССР.

.

[nokhor]

i believe that the chinese success in pushing back the american forces had more to do with american logistical weakness than chinese tactical success. historically it has been much easier to supply a large army from china moving southwards through korea, than to supply a large army from japan moving northward through korea. there is a great operational similarity between the japanese invasions of korea under hideyoshi, and the american war in korea under mcarthur. so i don't think it's a case of the chinese turning things around rapidly from wwii to korea, but rather a case of the logisitical difficulties of moving northward through korean and then meeting a massive chinese counterattack at the end of your logistical rope.

and in fact for the chinese communists, the korean war was a win-win situation. the reason for the massive desertions and lackluster performance by the rank and file chinese infantry man in korea, was because a lot of those guys had only a couple of years before been fighting for the nationalist side in the civil war. so the communists were using their recent internal enemies to fight their external enemies.

[Derfasciti]

I believed they lost due to China's natural division. Although I could be wrong. I don't know much about the war.

[Kraxis]

The Chinese soldiers didn't have much in sense of a national feeling. Imagine being sent from the borders of Vietnam to near Nanking, and being an uneducated peasant with a rifle. Would you feel that much as home? You couldn't talk to the locals, and you couldn't write with them either. It would be totally foreign to you.

The Banzai charge was good at times, but most often it was just scary, and something that hastened the fall of the given island, in more actual battles it was at it's best, and at Tarawa it nearly broke through. But as a tactic it was costly and not good for an isolated garrison.

The Japanese tried to adapt, by for instance only guarding a section of an island (failed miserably) or creating operational reserves (failed due to US aircover). The only tactic they developed that seemed to have an impact on the American drive (with superior weapons and numbers) was the infiltration. If the Americans took a like of bunkers or manholes, the Japanese would infiltrate and reoccupy those positions. Staying silent for days perhaps until finally opening fire on unsuspecting patrols or convoys.

It was a pain to continually go back and refight battles, and obviously a drain on morale as the soldiers would think the generals had let the enemy retake the positons without a fight (a la Hamburger Hill in Vietnam).