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The Fifth Battle of the Leizhou Peninsula
The Fifth Battle of the Leizhou Peninsula
The new tanks in action - American made, Chinese-bought M4 Shermans.
“
I fought against German tankers in Belgium.
Italian tankers in Libya.
Soviet tankers in Korea.
The Chinese tankers were the bravest of them all.
They drove around in these little tin cans with riveted armor - in 1943. They were slow. Their guns couldn’t penetrate ours frontally unless they got lucky and couldn’t penetrate our side armor. They were basically glorified upgrades of the same tanks that the Italians were driving in 1940 - and they were already obsolete by them. We knew it, The Italians knew it and they fought like they knew it too.
But the Chinese fought like they had the armor of KVs, attempted maneuvers like they were T-34s and shot at us like they had the guns of Tigers. Even though they were totally outmatched - still they kept coming and coming and coming in their ‘coffins.’
That’s what we called them - and that’s what the captured tank crews said they called em too so I have no idea why they kept agreeing to fight in them.
It made us sloppy. When one Churchill could take on 20 coffins, there wasn’t really any need for tactics.
In fact - scattering our tanks made sense - because the main threat was from the air.
So when they finally showed up at the Yank tanks they’d purchased, they swept us aside.
Their guns could penetrate us from all sides, they were more mobile and their armor could occasionally bounce a shell if they got lucky. There was no ‘one hit kill’ anymore like with the coffins where even a spent shell hitting it could cause the riveting to fly loose and bounce around the tank with deadly force.
So fell backwards and kept falling backwards. We’d hold for a position for a day or two but then get pushed back by either the yank tanks or their damn air force. Our air force seem to have disappeared during this time and naval support was patchy too.
Eventually we couldn’t keep retreating and we got back on the same boats we’d come in. At this point morale was so low, we’d been fighting continously for three weeks with little snatches here and there. Only the nips were actually still capable of fighting the rearguard action which they fought along with some of the curries that stayed in the back lines. Of course - that’s because the gooks and nips didn’t take prisoners of each other - but what can you expect? Brave bastards the lot of them, but savage. We should never have gotten involved in this damn war. This was no white man’s war.”
The analysis above, while useful in portraying the front-line perspective of the fighting men is inadequate to assess the scope of the battle. In particular, why the Naitonal Revolutionary Army which had proved itself incapable of shifting the Entente troops from the Leizhou Peninsula over the course of four previous battles suddenly seemed to perform so well.
The main answer is of course - logistics. One of the main reforms that Wang Jingwei instituted in his premiership was purchasing arms, supplies and weapons from America. Although on paper, Chinese arms production had somehow kept pace in production despite the loss of just under half of China’s industrial capacity - this concealed a grim reality that was revealed in the Xiaoping Report.
The report revealed that in order to keep pace with the insane demands to somehow produce at the same level while losing a big chunk of China’s industrial heartland, everyone was engaging in watering down. So for example - in a Tianjin-41 tank the steel that the tank was made out of would be made from watered down steel with watered down iron and half the coal needed. The shells would be packed with explosives mixed with sawdust and other things to thicken it out. With war material and ammunition made so unreliable because of a climate of fear, patriotism and group think - the combat performance of Chinese units had dropped. Rather than suppressing the report or ignoring the problem - as Chiang was wont to do, Wang addressed the issue head on by contracting war supply production to the US and stopping all offensives.
By the time that the 5th Battle of the Leizhou Peninsula or the Leizhou offensive was launched, the supply issues had mostly been resolved (at great cost and debt - as the Chinese would find out in the post-war years.) Yes - the new tanks did help - but what helped more was artillery that would actually fire explosives that would go off. Rifles that could fire without coming unstuck or exploding.
So the result was (predictably) a victory for the Chinese army, despite fierce Entente resistance. The victory would have massive repercussions, not only in the strategic picture of the war with all of Mainland china liberated from foreign rule (except Hainan and Manchuria) but from the revalation that Japanese and Indian troops had been left to do the rearguard fighting while the British and ANZAC troops were evacuated first (post war histories show that an attempt to detail the 28th Maori battalion for rearguard duties led to a mutiny of the entire 1st NZ Division - including by the divisional general Freyberg.)
The new tanks in action - American made, Chinese-bought M4 Shermans.
“
I fought against German tankers in Belgium.
Italian tankers in Libya.
Soviet tankers in Korea.
The Chinese tankers were the bravest of them all.
They drove around in these little tin cans with riveted armor - in 1943. They were slow. Their guns couldn’t penetrate ours frontally unless they got lucky and couldn’t penetrate our side armor. They were basically glorified upgrades of the same tanks that the Italians were driving in 1940 - and they were already obsolete by them. We knew it, The Italians knew it and they fought like they knew it too.
But the Chinese fought like they had the armor of KVs, attempted maneuvers like they were T-34s and shot at us like they had the guns of Tigers. Even though they were totally outmatched - still they kept coming and coming and coming in their ‘coffins.’
That’s what we called them - and that’s what the captured tank crews said they called em too so I have no idea why they kept agreeing to fight in them.
It made us sloppy. When one Churchill could take on 20 coffins, there wasn’t really any need for tactics.
In fact - scattering our tanks made sense - because the main threat was from the air.
So when they finally showed up at the Yank tanks they’d purchased, they swept us aside.
Their guns could penetrate us from all sides, they were more mobile and their armor could occasionally bounce a shell if they got lucky. There was no ‘one hit kill’ anymore like with the coffins where even a spent shell hitting it could cause the riveting to fly loose and bounce around the tank with deadly force.
So fell backwards and kept falling backwards. We’d hold for a position for a day or two but then get pushed back by either the yank tanks or their damn air force. Our air force seem to have disappeared during this time and naval support was patchy too.
Eventually we couldn’t keep retreating and we got back on the same boats we’d come in. At this point morale was so low, we’d been fighting continously for three weeks with little snatches here and there. Only the nips were actually still capable of fighting the rearguard action which they fought along with some of the curries that stayed in the back lines. Of course - that’s because the gooks and nips didn’t take prisoners of each other - but what can you expect? Brave bastards the lot of them, but savage. We should never have gotten involved in this damn war. This was no white man’s war.”
- Lt. Bryce Edwards, 2nd Armored Regiment on “Voices of War.”
The analysis above, while useful in portraying the front-line perspective of the fighting men is inadequate to assess the scope of the battle. In particular, why the Naitonal Revolutionary Army which had proved itself incapable of shifting the Entente troops from the Leizhou Peninsula over the course of four previous battles suddenly seemed to perform so well.
The main answer is of course - logistics. One of the main reforms that Wang Jingwei instituted in his premiership was purchasing arms, supplies and weapons from America. Although on paper, Chinese arms production had somehow kept pace in production despite the loss of just under half of China’s industrial capacity - this concealed a grim reality that was revealed in the Xiaoping Report.
The report revealed that in order to keep pace with the insane demands to somehow produce at the same level while losing a big chunk of China’s industrial heartland, everyone was engaging in watering down. So for example - in a Tianjin-41 tank the steel that the tank was made out of would be made from watered down steel with watered down iron and half the coal needed. The shells would be packed with explosives mixed with sawdust and other things to thicken it out. With war material and ammunition made so unreliable because of a climate of fear, patriotism and group think - the combat performance of Chinese units had dropped. Rather than suppressing the report or ignoring the problem - as Chiang was wont to do, Wang addressed the issue head on by contracting war supply production to the US and stopping all offensives.
By the time that the 5th Battle of the Leizhou Peninsula or the Leizhou offensive was launched, the supply issues had mostly been resolved (at great cost and debt - as the Chinese would find out in the post-war years.) Yes - the new tanks did help - but what helped more was artillery that would actually fire explosives that would go off. Rifles that could fire without coming unstuck or exploding.
So the result was (predictably) a victory for the Chinese army, despite fierce Entente resistance. The victory would have massive repercussions, not only in the strategic picture of the war with all of Mainland china liberated from foreign rule (except Hainan and Manchuria) but from the revalation that Japanese and Indian troops had been left to do the rearguard fighting while the British and ANZAC troops were evacuated first (post war histories show that an attempt to detail the 28th Maori battalion for rearguard duties led to a mutiny of the entire 1st NZ Division - including by the divisional general Freyberg.)
- CCA
- Word Count: 910