China, Burma and India · China vs Japan
Second Sino-Japanese War
1 September 1939 – 2 September 1945
Japan had been at war with China since July 1937 and by September 1939 held the coast and the main cities while the Nationalist government fought on from Chongqing. The front settled into a long attritional struggle punctuated by Japanese offensives, most of them aimed at Changsha, until the Ichi-Go offensive of 1944 opened an overland corridor through central China. Chinese forces recovered some ground in 1945 before the Japanese surrender.
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Day by day
— After Wuhan
Japan has been at war in China for two years and holds the coast, the northern plain and the railways between them, with the government of the Republic five hundred miles inland at Chongqing. On 17 September the 11th Army drives south from Hubei on Changsha and is stopped short of the city; it will try three more times.
— The Hundred Regiments
The Communist Eighth Route Army puts a hundred and more regiments against the railways and mines of Shanxi and Hebei, the one large Communist offensive of the war; the Japanese answer with three months of reprisals in the villages. In June the 11th Army had taken Ichang on the Yangtze, bringing its bombers within reach of Chongqing.
— Third Changsha
As Japan attacks across the Pacific, the 11th Army goes for Changsha a third time and is beaten: Xue Yue lets the columns into the city and closes on their flanks, and by mid-January they are back on the Xinqiang. Hong Kong surrenders on Christmas Day. For the next two years the front barely moves; Changde is taken in November 1943 and retaken three weeks later.
— Ichi-Go
Half a million men, the largest Japanese land offensive of the war, set out to open a railway from Manchuria to Indochina and to overrun the American airfields in the south. The 12th Army crosses the Yellow River in Henan and clears the Peking to Hankow line, taking Luoyang on 25 May. The second phase starts from Wuhan on 27 May: Changsha falls on 18 June at the fourth attempt, and Hengyang holds out for forty-seven days.
— The corridor
Liuzhou falls on 10 November and Guilin the next day; by the end of the month patrols from Guangxi and from Indochina have met, and Japan has its overland road from Manchuria to Hanoi. The airfields it was built to take have already been demolished by the Americans who flew from them. In Chongqing the government has lost its best divisions and the corridor is a railway through country it does not hold.
— The last offensives
The Japanese attack west from Hunan towards the airfield at Zhijiang and are stopped in the hills; by early June the American-equipped divisions have driven them back, the last large engagement of the war in China. Chinese forces retake Nanning on 27 May, Liuzhou on 30 June and Guilin on 27 July. The surrender is announced on 15 August and signed for the China theatre at Nanjing on 9 September.
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