Battle of Wuhan

Wuhan Before the Battle

After Nanjing fell at the end of 1937 the Nationalist government announced its move to Chongqing, but the Military Affairs Commission and many party and government bodies remained in Wuhan, which for a time became the country's political, economic and military centre. According to the historian Stephen R. MacKinnon, large numbers of refugees displaced by the war poured into the three cities of Wuhan in the spring of 1938; he cites the contemporary description of Wuhan as "China's Madrid," a city visited by foreign writers and photographers including Robert Capa, W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood. Before the campaign began, Japanese aircraft repeatedly raided Wuhan and were met by the Chinese air force and Soviet volunteer airmen, including in an air battle on 29 April 1938, the Japanese emperor's birthday. According to Xinhua, the Soviet Union sent more than 2,000 pilots to China during the war.

Chiang Kai-shek described the purpose of the campaign, according to his collected speeches, as follows: "The main purpose of defending Wuhan was to hold up the enemy's westward advance, wear down his strength, prepare communications in the rear, transport and stockpile necessary weapons, and move the industries of the southeast and centre to build up the northwest and southwest." An article in Taiwan's Air Force Officer Bimonthly quotes Chiang telling the commanders charged with defending Wuhan that "senior commanders must be resolved to die and swear to live or die with Wuhan."

The Opposing Forces

On the Japanese side, Hata Shunroku, commander of the Central China Expeditionary Army, was in overall command. The 11th Army under Okamura Yasuji advanced west along both banks of the Yangtze, while the 2nd Army under Prince Higashikuni Naruhiko moved along the northern foothills of the Dabie Mountains through Lu'an, Gushi and Huangchuan towards Xinyang, to swing south on Wuhan. Figures for the forces involved vary: Xinhua says Japan used 350,000 troops against a Chinese army of a million; a 2015 article in The Paper says China committed 14 army groups with more than 50 armies, about a million men, against about 170,000 men of the Japanese 2nd Army and about 200,000 of the 11th, close to 400,000 in all. In the Chinese defences along the Yangtze, the Madang garrison area was under the direct command of Chen Cheng, commander of the Wuhan garrison.

Fighting Along the Yangtze

According to the Japanese 6th Division's unit history, on 6 June 1938 the division attacked Chinese outposts south of Luzhou; on 12 June the Japanese took Anqing, and the Madang fortress on the Yangtze became the front line. On 24 June more than 2,000 men of the Hata Detachment, covered by naval and air forces, landed at Xiangkou about 30 kilometres downstream of Madang. According to material compiled by the media centre of Pengze County, Jiangxi, at dawn on 26 June the Japanese released poison gas in front of the positions of the 7th Company of the Chinese Navy's 2nd Battalion at the western end of Changshan, and that afternoon the Madang fortress fell. The Japanese then pushed upriver, taking Hukou and Jiujiang.

In September Chinese forces held the Japanese at the Tianjiazhen fortress, where hills command the river about 150 kilometres below Wuhan. The Japanese 6th Division suffered heavy losses at Taihu, Huangmei, Guangji and Tianjiazhen; a regimental history records that from 1 August to 26 October the division lost 2,308 killed and 7,277 wounded.

Wanjialing

After Jiujiang fell, part of the Japanese 11th Army attacked through northern Jiangxi towards De'an and Nanchang. In the autumn of 1938 the 106th Division pushed deep into the Wanjialing area in De'an County, Jiangxi, and was surrounded by Chinese forces under Xue Yue. The Japanese soldier Nasu Ryosuke later wrote in Three Weeks in Hell Valley: "We marched into this valley, and only later learned that tens of thousands of enemy troops were waiting for us in the surrounding hills!" On 8 October he recorded close-quarters fighting, with "almost no food — we staved off hunger with rice husks," and supplies dropped by air. Xinhua says Chinese forces fought for more than ten days, killed more than 10,000 of the enemy and "nearly wiped out the main body of the Japanese 106th Division"; in mainland China the battle is counted with Pingxingguan and Taierzhuang as one of the "three great victories" of the war. According to the Japanese unit history, the 106th Division lost 3,321 killed, 4,085 wounded and 9,905 sick over the whole Wuhan campaign.

Leaving Wuhan

In October Japanese columns broke through the outer defences and closed on Wuhan. On 24 October the gunboat Zhongshan was bombed by six Japanese aircraft and sank in the Yangtze at Jinkou, with Captain Sa Shijun and 25 officers and men killed. According to Global People, that night Chiang Kai-shek and Soong Mei-ling flew out of Wuhan to Hengyang, travelling on through Changsha, Guangzhou and Guilin before arriving in Chongqing with the Military Affairs Commission on 9 December.

According to a telegram from the American Consul General at Hankou, Paul R. Josselyn, on 25 October a spokesman for the Military Affairs Commission announced that morning that Chinese forces had decided to withdraw from Wuhan, saying that "the real significance of defending the Wuhan area does not lie in the possession of the three cities but in the protection given to the transfer of man power and material resources from Southeast and Central China to China's northwest and southwest," and that after six months of resistance on the Yangtze front it was unnecessary to defend Wuhan further. On 26 October Josselyn reported that Japanese destroyers had arrived in the river at Hankou and Japanese army detachments had reached the Japanese Concession.

Casualty Figures

Casualty figures differ widely. According to a 2015 article in The Paper, the Military Operations Department of the Military Affairs Commission counted 256,000 Japanese casualties on the basis of unit combat reports; Japan's official war history, the Senshi Sosho published in 1975, records 9,600 casualties in the 2nd Army and 21,886 in the 11th Army, 31,486 in all, while a separate Japanese survey shows more than 100,000 cases of sickness in the 11th Army alone. The article's author, working from Japanese divisional and regimental histories, estimates Japanese killed and wounded at 55,000 to 70,000, plus more than 100,000 sick. An article in Taiwan's Air Force Officer Bimonthly gives Chinese casualties of more than 400,000 and Japanese casualties of more than 200,000.

After the Fall of Wuhan

Although the Japanese took Wuhan, they did not force the Nationalist government to submit. Xinhua says the campaign shattered Japan's hopes of a "quick victory" and moved the China theatre into strategic stalemate; the Taiwan Air Force Officer Bimonthly article says most of the Nationalist army's main force survived, and that Japan launched no operation on the scale of Wuhan until Operation Ichi-go in 1944. In December 1938 Wang Jingwei, deputy leader of the Nationalist Party, left Chongqing for Hanoi and went on to collaborate with Japan.