The Chinese forces performed better than most people thought during the war, focusing on a mobile defence in depth strategy combined with guerilla tactics hindering Japanese manoeuvers. This strategy was advised by the German advisors who considered that Japan would never be able to win an attrition war against China. It worked, China kept over half of Japan’s total armed forces "tied up" from 1937 to 1945.
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https://www.feldgrau.com/WW2-German-Military-Mission-China
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sino-German_cooperation_(1926-1941)
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https://etd.ohiolink.edu/!etd.send_file?accession=osu1319222757&disposition=inline
By trading space for time and avoiding decisive defeat, Japan’s troops were slowly worn down by a nation that would not surrender. If you do consider the successful delaying actions at the Second Battle of Shanghai (76 days) and the Battle of Nanjing in 1937, they were Chinese strategic victories as they allowed the relocation of industries and authorities to Wuhan. Even if it meant the sacrifice of some of the best German-trained Chinese troops.
The Battle of Wuhan (11 June – 27 October 1938) can also be considered as a Chinese strategic victory, even if after four months of intense fighting, both the Chinese Air Force and the Navy were decimated and Wuhan was captured. The main Chinese land force remained largely intact, while the IJA was significantly weakened.
The battle of Wuhan bought more time for Chinese forces and equipment in Central China to move further inland to Chongqing, laying the foundation for an extended war of resistance. Many outside observers assumed that China could not hold out, and the most likely scenario was a quick Japanese victory over China before 1940.
Chinese troops won some decisive battles before Pearl-Harbor, allowing them not to lose against a better equipped opponent :
- Tai’erzhuang
- Suixian–Zaoyang
- Changsha
- South Guangxi
- 1939–40 Winter Offensive
- Central Hubei Operation
- Hundred Regiments Offensive by communist forces
After the capture of Wuhan, the IJA advance in central China was slowed down significantly by multiple battles around Changsha in 1939, 1941, and 1942. No more major offensives were launched there until Operation Ichi-Go in 1944.
Reading about the Sino-Japanese war shows that most of the Japanese victories in China were Pyrric ones. Studying Chinese victories is also interesting, as it shows that NRA and Communist commanders weren't as stupid as described in many western, mainly American, history books. They didn't only rely on massive suicide attacks, knew how to retreat when needed and how to counterattack.
Allies saw the Chinese theater as a means to tie up a large number of Japanese troops, as well as being a location for airbases from which to strike the Japanese home islands. The Allies' "Europe First" policy did not sit well with Chiang, while the later British insistence that China send more and more troops to Indochina for use in the Burma Campaign can be seen as an attempt to use Chinese manpower to defend British colonial holdings. Allies refused the return of the Y Force from Burma to defend Kunming, the capital of Yunnan province, which was also threatened by the Japanese advance.
The British and Americans generally refused to understand that Chiang had to balance the needs of China as a whole against fighting the Japanese in a British colony.
Chinese theater wasn't their priority and the allied supplies were often ridiculously low. From 1942 to 1944 98 percent of U.S. military aid over the Hump had gone directly to the 14th Air Force and U.S. military personnel in China. In July 1945, 71,000 tons of supplies were flown over the Hump, compared to only 6,000 tons using the Ledo Road, and the airlift operation continued in operation until the end of the war. By the time supplies were flowing over the Ledo Road in large quantities, operations in other theaters had shaped the course of the war against Japan.
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https://www.britannica.com/place/China/War-between-Nationalists-and-communists#ref590719
Worse, Joseph Stiwell, who hated Chiang Kai Shek and disliked commanding "limey troops" repeatedly and regularly committed Chinese forces to do-or-die engagements. Stilwell even ordered Office of Strategic Services (OSS) officers to draw up contingency plans to assassinate Chiang Kai-shek after he heard Roosevelt's casual remarks regarding the possible defeat of Chiang by either internal or external enemies, and if this happened to replace Chiang with someone else to continue the Chinese resistance against Japan.
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https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_Stilwell#Recall_from_China
Before walking/fleeing from Bruma, he didn't properly inform his Chinese commanders of this general retreat order and sent his headquarters ahead to India. Chinese troops, under his command, flought by themselves to China through primitive forests in Northern Burma. Those units were decimated by Japanese ambushes along with malaria, dysentery and starvation.
After Burma fell to the Japanese, a controversy developed over whether the principal Chinese and U.S. effort against Japan should be devoted to building up U.S. air power based in China or to reform of the Chinese army and its training and equipment for a combat role. Chiang advocated primary reliance on U.S. air power to defeat Japan. Several high-ranking U.S. generals, on the other hand, emphasized creation of a compact and modernized Chinese ground force able to protect the airfields in China and to assist in opening an overland supply route across northern Burma.
At the first
Cairo Conference in November, Chiang met Churchill and Roosevelt for the first time. U.S. planners realized that Japan might be approached successfully through the south and central Pacific and that the Soviet Union would enter the war against Japan after Germany’s defeat; hence, the importance of China to U.S. grand strategy declined. Churchill was unwilling to use naval resources, needed for the forthcoming European invasion, in a seaborne invasion of Burma to help reopen China’s supply line.
Shortly after Cairo, Churchill and Roosevelt agreed to set aside the seaborne invasion of Burma. Despite the severe shortage of matériel after the allied defeat in Burma, Chinese forces were successful in repelling major Japanese offensives
in Hubei and Changde.
By the end of 1944, Chinese troops under the command of Sun Li-jen attacking from India, and those under Wei Lihuang attacking from Yunnan, joined forces in Mong-Yu, successfully driving the Japanese out of North Burma and securing the Ledo Road, China's vital supply artery.
The Chinese forces worst defeat was the result of operation Ichi-Go (from April to December 1944). This campaign, if successful, would also allow Japan to attack Sichuan and eventually the Chinese war time capital Chongqing. Even after this major offensive, Japanese forces controlled only the cities, not their surrounding countryside. The increased size of the occupied territory also thinned out the Japanese lines.
A great majority of the Chinese forces were able to retreat out of the area, and later come back to attack Japanese positions. As a result, future Japanese attempts to fight into Sichuan, such as in the Battle of West Hunan, ended in failure. Concurrently, the Chinese managed to repel a Japanese offensive in Henan and Hubei and launched a successful attack on Japanese forces in Guangxi, turning the course of the war sharply in China's favor.
All in all, Japan was not any closer in defeating China after Ichi-Go, and the constant defeats the Japanese suffered in the Pacific meant that Japan never got the time and resources needed to achieve final victory over China.
With the Chinese army progressing well in training and equipment, Wedemeyer and Chiang Kai Shek planned to launch Operation Carbonado in summer 1945 to retake Guangdong, thus obtaining a coastal port, and from there drive northwards toward Shanghai. However, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and Soviet invasion of Manchuria hastened Japanese surrender and these plans were not put into action.
In 1941 and 1942, Japan overextended itself. Its troops could not defend its conquests, and its industrial base could not strengthen them anymore. Japan was bogged down in China and sooner or later would have lost around 1945 or 1946.
The role of tungsten
Fortunately, I discovered an interesting article on tungsten/wolfram production and exports during Interwar period and during the war. let me introduce you to
Tungsten in the Second World War : China, Japan, Germany, the Allies and Iberia.
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https://revistas.comillas.edu/index.php/internationalrelations/article/download/8235/7896
This article studies the production, legal and illegal trade, and provisioning of strategic mineral wolfram/tungsten both by the Allies and the Axis during World War II. It analyzes the case the world’s largest producer of this mineral, China, the trade agreements signed by Chiang Kai-shek before the war with Nazi Germany, the USSR and Britain and their evolution during the global conflict. It also analyzes Japan, its difficulties in obtaining Chinese wolfram and its dependence on Korea. As for Nazi Germany, it studies its supply of Chinese ore until 1941 and later in the Iberian Peninsula, a trade made difficult by the Allied preventive purchases in Spain and Portugal. The article also studies the case of the US, its progressive auto provisioning in the Western Hemisphere, the airlift established between China and India to extract tungsten and distribution of amounts of it in Britain and the USSR. Finally, the article includes an assess- ment of the importance of tungsten within the set of strategic materials used by the contenders in the war and concludes that the Allied strategy hinder or prevent the provision of the enemy helped to reduce use and negatively affected the effectiveness of its machinery of war.
Reading this dense article, I learnt a few facts on China.
Firstly, China was the world main source of tungsten between 1913 and 1937. Secondly, within China, 95 % of the tungsten was extracted in the Nanling region, a mountainous area that includes part of the southern provinces of Kiangsi, Kwantung, Kwangsi, Yunnan and Hunan, the first having the largest wolfram deposits and supplying 70 % of the total output of wolframite, the mineral form in which tungsten is most commonly found in the region. Thirdly, centralized control of production would not arrive until February 1936, in the shape of an Agreement on Control over the Tungsten Industry formulated by the Ministry of Economic Affairs, and passed by Executive Yuan’s fourteenth meeting, which would establish central control over tungsten and construct a legal system for the tungsten industry.
The article also gives an important information, the China’s foreign loans involving tungsten ore before the pacific war (Table 1) and the successive agreements signed during the war, including the organization of transports. Those agreements explain parts of the Allies strategy on China Theater and demonstrate the allied dependency regarding Chinese production. Interestingly enough, Soviet Union had no source of tungsten outside of China.
More statistics
The Mineral Yearbook, 1940 (and each edition thereafter from 1941 to 1950)
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http://digicoll.library.wisc.edu/cg...940.RRidgway05&id=EcoNatRes.MinYB1940&isize=M
USSR tungsten production statistics are from Tungsten Industry USSR (1988) Table 4, pp. 15 -16
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https://digital.library.unt.edu/ark:/67531/metadc40315/m2/1/high_res_d/mineraliss_1988_11_w.pdf
Negotiating China's Destiny in World War II. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2015.
- Tungsten in Peace and War, 1918–1946; University of Nevada Press, 2010.
The internationalization of China : Foreign relations at home and abroad during the republican era :
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http://www3.nccu.edu.tw/~lorenzo/Kirby Internationalization of China.pdf
Those sources gave me a few thoughts. It’s clear that a nationalization of tungsten ore mining is needed to guarantee the continuity of production despite the warlords rivalries. There is an urgent need to modernize the mining industry to improve the rate of production as a way to gain more foreign loans and banter agreements. The dependency of Soviet Union on Chinese ore was higher than any other member of the Allies.
I think that an agreement could possibly be signed with Soviet Union on tungsten before Barbarossa. As a result, China will have to centralize the production and the Soviets would help China to modernize its mining industry and perhaps send more advisors than OTL to KMT.
- Sino-german cooperation (1926-1941)
- Sino-soviet cooperation (1931-1945) ?
Earlier victory?
An earlier victory depends on the extend pre-war effort to build a truly effective, modernized, national army before the battle of Shanghai. In OTL, only eight divisions were fully trained by the Germans by the time of the Japanese invasion of 1937. Most of them were sacrified defending Shanghai, Nanjing and Wuhan.
There is perhaps a need to downsize and partially demobilize in order to train a small core army, whose soldiers could later act as officers during a future mobilization or extension (yep Weimar Reichswehr). The disbanded troops would be sent to militia (aka FreiKorps) and trained later. It was Von Falkenhausen's plan.
During the last years of the German Military Mission to China, an agreement was reached whereby Germany was obliged to train 20 infantry divisions by 1937/1938; the whole Chinese army, navy and air force by the early 1940's. However, by the time of the Japanese invasion of 1937, only eight divisions were fully trained by the Germans due to the lack of time, rivalities between warlords and corruption.
On strategies
The attraction strategy used by the Chinese was to seem weak, where you are strong (Art of war). They purposely let gaps and weaknesses in their frontlines/defensive positions or even retreated to attract the enemy attacks in specific positions.
It’s important to note that such a (Fabian?) strategy only works if your opponent fully commits its forces where you chose. Reason why it failed against Mao and his communist forces who used the same tactics. Consider the Japanese like water and the Chinese defensive positions like dams.
Tactically, Chinese forces used a mix of direct frontal counterattacks, tactical retreats and infiltration tactics to disturb the Japanese offensives and to lock them in position without committing all their own forces. (gain initiative) Strategically, they tried to outmaneuver their enemy flanking or encircling him, while focusing on weak forces (stormtrooper tactics used at the strategic level) to disturb/outbalance the Japanese.
Of course, the use of guerilla troops was crucial to hinder enemy movements in its rear and bleed the future attacking troops with thousands cuts, while lowering their morale. Journals and letters written by Japanese soldiers show a deep fear of the "dishonorable" Chinese partisans with a gradual demoralization that often occurred long before reaching the frontline.