Theater Overview · Battlefields Behind Enemy Lines (1937–45)

After Taiyuan fell, the Eighth Route Army's three divisions broke themselves into smaller formations and slipped behind the Japanese occupation zones, using eight years to turn the "occupied areas" into a net the enemy could not chew through: this line had no grand campaign, only tens of thousands of small engagements, five "public-order strengthening" campaigns, countless villages burned down, and base areas with a population of one hundred million.

Engagement Data

Belligerents

Terrain and Conditions

Behind enemy lines meant "behind the enemy": the base areas were embedded in the countryside between Japanese-occupied cities and transport lines, and their borders moved every day. Three kinds of zones coexisted: base areas, guerrilla zones, and enemy-occupied areas; one county could have all three colors occupying different parts. The gray zones made up of puppet regimes, puppet troops, and "maintenance associations" -- the complex spectrum inside the three characters for "occupied area" -- formed the ground tone of this front. Do not simplify it.

Why It Was Fought

The gunfire at Sihang Warehouse stopped, and Shanghai then changed hands; in the same November, Taiyuan was also lost. From Beiping and Tianjin to Shanghai and Taiyuan, in the first four months of the war the front-line battlefield retreated from one campaign to the next, and North China's cities and railway lines fell one after another into Japanese hands. But the map soon showed one thing: Japanese strength was sufficient to occupy points and lines, not areas. Beyond the cities and between the railways lay thousands upon thousands of villages that its reach could not cover -- this "area" was the spatial precondition for the existence of the battlefields behind enemy lines.

Some people calculated this step in advance. From August 22 to 25, 1937, around the time the Red Army was reorganized as the Eighth Route Army, the CPC held an enlarged Politburo meeting at Fengjia Village, Luochuan, in northern Shaanxi, and set the policy: independent mountain guerrilla warfare -- not colliding head-on with Japanese aircraft and heavy artillery, but going behind it. The Battle of Taiyuan was the first rehearsal of this method: Pingxingguan struck baggage, Yanmen Pass cut the road, Yangmingbao burned the airfield, while the main force was never staked on the gambling table of frontal positions. At the end of the campaign, the Nationalist Army withdrew south; the Eighth Route Army's three divisions moved in the opposite direction and remained in Shanxi: part of the 115th Division followed Nie Rongzhen up Mount Wutai, the 120th Division went to northwestern Shanxi, and the 129th Division entered southeastern Shanxi -- Taihang, Luliang, and Wutai, the mountains of Shanxi, became the first footholds behind enemy lines. The whole army at this point numbered only 45,000 men (statistical bases vary by account).

This policy was not uncontested. Around the reorganization, some commanders at the front argued for concentrating forces, coordinating with the front-line battlefield, and fighting several larger battles of mobile warfare; the Battle of Pingxingguan was one practice of this argument. The central line insisted on dividing the forces, mobilizing the populace, and opening base areas. The choice between the two views remained in the telegrams back and forth (specific telegram titles unverified), and was later fixed as "basically guerrilla warfare, while not relaxing mobile warfare under favorable conditions" (date and source of the fixed formulation unverified) -- the dispute was not erased, but written into the policy itself.

On November 9, Taiyuan fell, and regular warfare in North China came to a close for the moment. Mao Zedong immediately judged that, from then on in North China, guerrilla warfare with the Communist Party as the main body had moved into the principal position (his November 12 report at a meeting of Party activists in Yan'an, "The Situation and Tasks in the War of Resistance After the Fall of Shanghai and Taiyuan"; quoted wording should follow the original text). Others withdrew toward the rear; this army turned the word "rear" around and used it as "behind the enemy."

The material boundaries of this method were entirely clear: the whole army had 45,000 men, not enough rifles and even less ammunition; the National Government issued pay and equipment according to the establishment of three divisions, and then reduced them year by year (timing and amounts unverified). It avoided frontal attrition because it could not afford attrition -- bullets came from captures, recruits from the villages, grain from the base areas. The Japanese side was marked by material limits as well: it scarcely had enough troops to spread through cities and railways, and for the thousands of villages between the railways it could only "occupy points and lines." Punitive detachments could get out of the city gates, but they could not reach every village.

The Japanese calculation at this point was still simple: once the cities were occupied and the railways opened, North China had been taken; what remained was only a problem of "public order." It did not expect that the two characters for "public order" would take eight years to write -- after five "public-order strengthening campaigns," its postwar official war history admitted that public order in North China had still not been established by the end of the war. From then on, the War of Resistance split into two layers: the front held off the blade, and the rear broke apart the occupation. This article records the layer underneath.

Course of the Engagement (Stage Table)

Southern Anhui Incident ※ (1941.1)

While the New Fourth Army headquarters and attached units, about 9,000 people, were moving north, they were encircled on 1941.1.6 in the Maolin area of Jing County, southern Anhui, by more than 80,000 Nationalist troops from seven divisions. After seven days of bloody fighting, most were lost: army commander Ye Ting was detained during negotiations, deputy army commander Xiang Ying was killed during the breakout (killed by a traitor; details unverified), and several thousand prisoners were sent to Shangrao Concentration Camp ※. Zhou Enlai wrote the line "An eternal injustice; one leaf south of the Yangtze." The KMT and CPC characterizations still differ (the "disobeyed orders and moved south" account and the "premeditated encirclement and annihilation" account -- documents from both sides placed side by side); Chongqing announced that the New Fourth Army had "mutinied" and cancelled its designation, while the CPC rebuilt its headquarters -- internal fratricide within the united front is a dark page that the battlefields behind enemy lines cannot avoid. Both accounts are recorded together.

Casualties and Losses

• Military and civilians behind enemy lines: the Eighth Route Army and New Fourth Army suffered more than 600,000 casualties (statistical bases vary by account); there is no overall ledger for militia and civilian deaths -- village archives under the "mopping-up" operations are handled in separate entries ※.
• Japanese-puppet side: CPC battle reports cumulatively recorded more than 1.71 million Japanese and puppet troops killed, wounded, or captured (including more than 520,000 Japanese troops -- this is the CPC basis; Japanese bases are far lower, and the dispute over statistical boundaries is connected with the front-line battlefield. Both accounts are placed side by side, with neither chosen).
• ※ Civilians: the Three Alls, no-man's zones, the spread of biological warfare, and grain plunder -- systematic violence borne by North China's countryside is difficult to count; write explicitly that there are "no statistics."
• Zuo Quan (deputy chief of staff of the Eighth Route Army, killed in the Shiziling breakout in 1942.5 -- the highest-ranking commander killed on the battlefields behind enemy lines).

Aftermath

• Armed forces and base areas behind enemy lines became the foundation for the reversal of the postwar balance of power between the KMT and CPC -- in the eight years of the War of Resistance, the CPC grew from 45,000 people to a million-strong army and a population of one hundred million: the balance of the civil war was quietly forged on the battlefields behind enemy lines. This is the largest historical consequence of this article.
• The guerrilla-warfare system became a twentieth-century military legacy worldwide (noted briefly as a textbook item in revolutionary wars around the world).
• "Tunnel warfare" and "mine warfare" entered national memory and film-and-television symbols -- the popularization of memory and its simplification (see also "How Each Side Records It").

Accounts of Those Present

• Three kinds of night in one county: at the village gate in a base area, militia checked travel passes; in a guerrilla zone, the village head dealt with the "maintenance association" by day and delivered intelligence to the Eighth Route Army by night ("two-sided regime" -- the survival wisdom and risks inside the gray zone); in the strongpoint in an enemy-occupied area, puppet troops dozed -- in one night, three worlds within thirty li.
• The account book of bullets: an army with only a few rounds for each rifle fought for eight years -- behind the "three-shot principle" (fire three shots and then shift position, with accounts varying by basis) lay the poverty of military industry and the economics of capture.
• Zuo Quan's family letter: a letter to his wife before he died for the country (the phrase "when shall we meet again," quotation unverified) -- the daily life of a senior commander behind enemy lines, and how near death was.
• The wall of the no-man's zone ※: the "human enclosures" of household consolidation into collective villages in eastern Hebei -- villagers inside the walls and homes burned outside them, the spatial form of Japanese-puppet public-order warfare (survivor oral-history layer, source unverified).

The Ground

• Net-shaped battlefield: no front line, only the interlocking teeth of points (strongpoints), lines (railways and roads), and areas (base areas) -- a space where "control changed by the hour."
• Tunnels and mines: turning the North China Plain three-dimensional -- underground village networks (Ranzhuang and other real sites) and "killing without seeing the enemy."
• Night of sabotage: tearing up railways, sawing down telegraph poles, cutting wires -- a night-time mass-war image in which farm tools confronted a modern transport system.
• Strongpoint attack and defense: blockhouses, trenches, and barbed wire as miniature fortresses, and the tactics of siege.

How Each Side Records It

• CPC canon: the vast ocean of people's war -- popular memory shaped by the films *Tunnel Warfare* and *Mine Warfare*, and its simplification (the real harshness of guerrilla warfare and the gray zones were flattened for a long time in the canon; recent scholarship has made them more complex).
• Nationalist-side narrative: the argument that the CPC "wandered without fighting" -- and the numerical dispute with the CPC claim that it "pinned down large numbers of Japanese and puppet forces" (all sides' bases for the pinned-down proportion are placed side by side: annual force disposition of the Japanese North China Area Army is checkable middle evidence, unverified). The dispute over contribution is an extension of political dispute; both sides' accounts and third-party data coexist.
• Japanese side: its war history has dedicated volumes on the "public-order war" in North China (*Public-Order War in North China* -- part of the Defense Agency's *Senshi Sosho*, showing a curve of rising assessments of "Communist forces" combat power), and admits that North China public order "had not been established" by the end of the war -- the opponent's account book is the hardest third-party testimony to the weight of the battlefields behind enemy lines.

Disputes and Sensitivities

• The dispute over front-line versus behind-the-lines contributions -- the overview-level frame has already been set; this article uses the Japanese *Public-Order War in North China* as a mirror for the effectiveness behind enemy lines, while not belittling the front line.
• The two sides' characterizations of the Southern Anhui Incident are placed side by side.
• The gray zone of puppet troops and "two-sided regimes" -- complexity, not moral cartoon.
• The gap between CPC battle-report figures and Japanese bases -- this divergence runs through the whole series.

Contents

Counter-"Mopping-Up" Operations are still handled under ※.

[Foreign war on Chinese soil] Siege of Tsingtao (1914)1914.08Three months after the First World War broke out, Japanese and British forces attacked the German leased territory of Tsingtao in Shandong, China: Europe's war opened an Asian front on Chinese soil. China declared neutrality and marked out a war zone, then watched Japanese forces move beyond it and occupy the entire Jiaozhou-Jinan Railway: one leaseholder was driven out, and a larger one arrived.Mukden Incident1931.09A short stretch of railway blown up by the Kwantung Army itself, Shenyang lost in a single night, the entire Northeast lost in just over four months -- the Fourteen-Year War of Resistance is counted from here.Northeast Volunteer Army and the Anti-Japanese United Army (1931–1942)1931.10After the Northeast fell, hundreds of thousands first rose with whatever arms they had and then scattered; later, a lone force held out in mountains at forty degrees below zero until only a little more than a thousand remained, and still would not put down its rifles -- the most isolated line of the Fourteen-Year War of Resistance.Resistance at Jiangqiao (Nen River Bridge)1931.10After the Mukden Incident, at the bridgehead over the Nen River, Ma Zhanshan said the first "no" to Japanese forces and fought for half a month -- the story of the "first shot of organized armed resistance against Japan" begins here.January 28 Incident (Battle of Shanghai, 1932)1932.01Less than half a year after the Northeast had been lost, Japanese forces again made trouble in Shanghai; the Nineteenth Route Army met them where they came, the Fifth Army arrived to fight beside it, and thirty-four days turned into a grinding seesaw - ending with a ceasefire agreement that tied the hands of Chinese troops in Shanghai and laid the unfavorable ground for the Battle of Shanghai (1937) five years later.Defense of the Great Wall (1933)1933.01In the first five months of 1933, from Yuguan to Rehe and then to the passes of the Great Wall, Chinese forces fought a series of localized resistances against Japanese forces -- the blood shed at several passes was finally let away by a single Tanggu Truce.Chahar Resistance (1933)1933.05In the summer of 1933, Feng Yuxiang, Ji Hongchang, and Fang Zhenwu raised an allied army at Zhangjiakou and recovered Duolun - the first recovery of lost territory by Chinese troops since the Mukden Incident; afterward, this army was deprived of pay, pressured, and dissolved by its own government.Suiyuan Resistance (1936)1936.11In the winter of 1936, Japan pushed puppet Mongol forces westward against Suiyuan; Fu Zuoyi's troops first held the front at Hongge'ertu, then in a snowy night raid struck Bailingmiao and took the enemy's lair -- a rare clean victory since the Mukden Incident; one month later came the Xi'an Incident.Beiping–Tianjin Operation1937.07In July 1937, from one night of gunfire at Marco Polo Bridge to the abandonment of Beiping, only twenty-two days passed -- the full-scale War of Resistance opened with a hurried and confused loss, while the three words "Marco Polo Bridge" became the call that mobilized an entire nation.Battle of Shanghai (1937)1937.08China fed its fighting units into Shanghai batch after batch - 700,000 against 300,000, 3 months, more than 250,000 casualties - and did not hold the city, but held two larger things: Japan's timetable for "settling China in 3 months" was made void, and the provincial armies that had once been a loose plate of sand bled for the first time in the same trench.Air War and the Navy (1937–45, combined account)1937.08The Chinese navy began its war of resistance by sinking more than forty of its own vessels; the Chinese air force carried eight years of lost air superiority on the lives of a generation of pilots. This article records what happened in the sky and on the river: the curve by which air superiority was lost in full and then taken back, and the Chinese, Soviet, and American pilots who died for that curve.Battles of Baoshan and Luodian1937.09.01At Baoshan, six hundred men held a small city for three days; the whole battalion died there, and even the opposing side's battle reports recorded the name of battalion commander Yao Ziqing. At Luodian, a town of only a few streets changed hands more than ten times, with both sides feeding in thousands of lives each day - the four words "mill of flesh and blood" were first called out from here.Battle of Taiyuan (1937)1937.09.11The largest campaign in North China: Yan Xishan's Jin-Sui Army, the Central Army moving south, and the Eighth Route Army, only recently reorganized, fought on the same map in Shanxi as three separate systems; at the front, Xinkou held for more than twenty days and did not let the Japanese forces through, but once Niangzi Pass broke on the flank, the whole line collapsed, and Taiyuan fell on 11.9. Before the smoke of the frontal campaign had cleared, the Eighth Route Army's three divisions had already remained in the mountains of Shanxi: the end of this battle was the opening of the battlefields behind enemy lines.Battle of Pingxingguan1937.09.25The Eighth Route Army's first battle after taking the field: the 115th Division laid an ambush in the ravine of Qiaogou at Pingxingguan, trapped more than a thousand men of the Itagaki Division's baggage train and motor convoy, and suffered more than six hundred casualties of its own; the battle was not large, but its echo was enormous -- on this day, the myth that the "Imperial Army could not be defeated" publicly collapsed for the first time, and that asymmetry itself is something this archive has to record.Battles of Xinkou and Niangzi Pass (1937)1937.10.13For more than twenty days at Xinkou, 80,000 defenders held the Itagaki Division on the front and did not yield a step -- the hardest positional battle fought by Chinese forces on the North China front; once Niangzi Pass on the eastern line fell, even the best defense at Xinkou had to withdraw -- **"Xinkou was not defeated; the defeat came at Niangzi Pass"**: the front held, the flank collapsed, and Taiyuan's fate was not decided before the Xinkou line.Night Raid on Yangmingbao1937.10.19When the Xinkou front was being pinned down by Japanese aircraft, a regiment of the Eighth Route Army slipped into Yangmingbao airfield in Daixian and burned more than twenty aircraft in a single night -- infantry took out an airfield, at the cost of one regimental commander and several dozen soldiers.Defense of Sihang Warehouse1937.10.26Four hundred and eleven men held one warehouse for six days, while announcing eight hundred to the outside world -- across the Suzhou Creek, a million citizens in the concessions and reporters from around the world watched from the opposite bank. This was a battle consciously fought for the world to see; the soldiers on the stage, however, were truly dying. After the play ended, they were imprisoned for four years, and their regimental commander died under the knives of his own men.Defense of Nanjing (※ Nanjing Massacre)1937.12Before the routed forces from Shanghai had even been gathered in, the defense of the capital had begun - it held for 8 days; the order to withdraw came in haste, and there were no boats by the river; in the 6 weeks after the city fell, the deaths of 300,000 people turned the word "Nanjing" from the name of a city into a wound known across the world.Battle of Xuzhou (1938)1938.01A group of "miscellaneous armies" long looked down on by the central authorities - Sichuan troops, Guangxi troops, Northwestern Army units, and Northeastern Army units - were braided into a single cord in Li Zongren's hands: 600,000 against 240,000, at Xuzhou, the junction of the Jinpu Railway, they won the first major victory of the full-scale War of Resistance; at the end, another 600,000 men broke out of the encirclement in organized formations, turning a defeated withdrawal into a "victorious retreat." The two words "miscellaneous armies" were washed clean by blood in this battle.Bombing of Chongqing ※1938.02From 1938 to 1943, Japanese forces carried out five years of strategic bombing against Chongqing and cities in the rear area, launching more than 200 air raids on Chongqing and dropping more than 20,000 bombs -- the first Chinese city subjected to long-term indiscriminate bombing, where "indiscriminate bombing" as a form of atrocity is written down explicitly.Defense of Tengxian1938.03.14One Sichuan force, the worst equipped and wanted by no one - the roughly three thousand men of the 122nd Division holding the city - held Isogai's Tenth Division at Tengxian for three days; divisional commander Wang Mingzhang died with the city, the division was fought out, and time was bought for the defense of Tai'erzhuang.Ambushes at Shentouling and Xiangtangpu (1938)1938.03.16Two textbook ambushes in a single month: at Shentouling, troops spent the night tucked against the road on a bare ridge deemed "unsuitable for ambush"; at Xiangtangpu, 180 Japanese motor vehicles were burned in half a day. Liu Bocheng's method of "drawing out enemy relief forces and striking them" became, from then on, a standard grammar of warfare behind enemy lines.Battle of Tai'erzhuang1938.03.23Sun Lianzhong's old Northwestern Army troops held house by house for two weeks in a walled town beside the canal, while Tang Enbo's corps looped back along the outer line and attacked from inside and outside, driving back the Seya Detachment of Isogai's Tenth Division - the first major victory on the frontal battlefield since the full-scale War of Resistance began, and the country went almost mad with joy.Battle of Lanfeng and the Huayuankou Breach (1938) ※1938.05After the breakout from Xuzhou, one Japanese division drove alone to the gates of Zhengzhou; more than ten Chinese divisions closed in but failed to destroy it, two army commanders abandoned cities in the face of battle, and one division commander was shot. The encirclement collapsed, and in the end Japanese forces were stopped by blowing open China's own Yellow River dike: 890,000 people (the postwar official basis) died in the yellow flood and the famine and epidemics that followed, and forty-four counties across Henan, Anhui, and Jiangsu were left as barren ground for ten years. This was the largest single case in the War of Resistance of "one's own people against one's own people."Battle of Wuhan (1938)1938.06One hundred and ten divisions arrayed themselves along both banks of the Yangtze and below the Dabie Mountains, holding against 250,000 Japanese forces advancing upstream - after four and a half months, Wuhan was still abandoned in the end, but the city was handed over intact, and the people withdrew singing; from this battle onward, Japan's four words "quick battle, quick decision" were made void, and the war was dragged into the stalemate it feared most.Zhanggufeng and Nomonhan [foreign wars on Chinese soil]1938.07At Zhanggufeng near the mouth of the Tumen River in 1938, and at Nomonhan on the Khalkha River in 1939, Japan and the Soviet Union fought two battles on the borderlands of China's Northeast - the ground lay on China's sovereign map, China was wholly absent; and the guns of Nomonhan changed the direction of the Pacific War, while also indirectly determining the later shape of the China theater.Battle of Wanjialing (1938)1938.09A Japanese division drove alone into the mountains of northern Jiangxi, was surrounded on all sides by Xue Yue's more than 100,000 men and fought there for more than ten days; even officers airdropped in to take over command could not break it out -- in the Fourteen-Year War of Resistance, this was the only battle that came **close** to annihilating an entire Japanese division.Battle of Nanchang (1939)1939.03The first major battle at the opening of the stalemate phase: Japanese forces used gas shells to cover a forced crossing of the Xiu River and opened the road with massed tanks, taking Nanchang in ten days; the Chinese side then counterattacked for more than a month, entered the city's outskirts, and fell short at the last step, while Chen Anbao, commander of the Twenty-Ninth Army, was killed in action.Battle of Suizhou–Zaoyang1939.05The Japanese Eleventh Army swept northern Hubei in an attempt to catch the main force of the Fifth War Area; Li Zongren avoided the strong points and struck the weak, while Zhang Zizhong led the right-wing corps east across the Xiang River for a flank attack; once Japanese forces had routed the opposition, they withdrew. The standard form of a stalemate-phase campaign appeared here in full for the first time: the Chinese side called it the "Great Victory of Suizhou–Zaoyang," the Japanese side called it "completion of the operational objective," and both sides won.First Battle of Changsha (1939)1939.09Roughly 100,000 Japanese troops drove on Changsha along three routes; Xue Yue used the Xinqiang River-Miluo River-Laodao River water lines for successive resistance, destroyed roads, and stripped the countryside of usable supplies. Japanese forces reached Changsha's outskirts but could neither take the city nor hold their position, and withdrew on their own: the Chinese side proclaimed the "Great Victory of Northern Hunan," the Japanese side called it "completion of the objective," and another campaign was won by both sides. This was the beginning of Changsha's three defenses.Battle of Huangtuling1939.11.03A mortar shell landed in an isolated courtyard in a Taihang Mountain gully and killed Lieutenant General Abe Norihide, the Japanese forces' "flower of famous generals" -- the highest-ranking Japanese commander killed by the Eighth Route Army; Tokyo radio mourned him, and only later did the squad leader firing the gun in the Taihang Mountains learn whom he had hit.Battle of Southern Guangxi and Kunlun Pass1939.11.15Japanese forces landed at Qinzhou Bay and drove straight toward Nanning, aiming to sever the Guangxi-Vietnam international transport line; Du Yuming's Fifth Army, China's only mechanized army, forced three assaults to take Kunlun Pass, killed the enemy brigade commander Nakamura Masao, and won a costly victory; but after the turn of the year came the defeat at Binyang, Kunlun Pass was won and then lost again, and the overall campaign was still lost: local triumph, overall failure.Winter Offensive1939.12In the winter of 1939, more than one hundred divisions across the frontal battlefield threw themselves at Japanese strongpoints at the same time, from Suiyuan to southern Guangxi. This was the only active full-front general offensive by Chinese forces in the Fourteen-Year War of Resistance, and it was also a general measurement of the frontal battlefield's offensive capacity: it measured that the will to fight was still there, and also measured the ceiling imposed by assault firepower.Battle of Zaoyang–Yichang1940.05The Japanese Eleventh Army struck northern Hubei again and took Yichang for the first time: an army-group commander-in-chief died on the firing line he had requested, and the gateway by which the Yangtze entered Sichuan was lost. The general's death and the gateway's loss belonged to the same campaign.Hundred Regiments Offensive1940.08One hundred and five regiments tore up North China's railways in the same night: the largest active offensive on the battlefields behind enemy lines, with brilliant results and a heavy price; for the next forty years, this battle fought another, longer battle of its own: from achievement to charge to rehabilitation, the political life of one engagement lasted longer than its military history.Counter-"Mopping-Up" Operations (1941–42, incl. ※ the "Three Alls")1941.01After the Hundred Regiments Offensive, Japanese forces changed the object of war in North China from armies to society itself -- "Three Alls" mopping-up, no man's zones, and the tightening of the "cage" cut the base areas' population and territory by nearly half in two years; counter-"mopping-up" was not one battle, but the way the entire military and civilian population of the base areas survived under strangulation.Battle of Shanggao1941.03A rare clean victory on the frontal battlefield during the stalemate phase: Luo Zhuoying's Nineteenth Group Army, centered on Wang Yaowu's Seventy-Fourth Corps, prepared a pocket in advance and encircled the overextended Thirty-Fourth Division of the Japanese forces on both banks of the Jinjiang around Shanggao in northern Jiangxi. It badly mauled the division; although it did not annihilate it in a single encirclement, the Chinese side held the battlefield initiative throughout.Battle of the Zhongtiao Mountains1941.05One hundred eighty thousand men had held a "great fortress behind enemy lines in North China" for three years; once Japanese forces closed the ring from all sides, it evaporated in little more than ten days -- not defeated by enemy strength, but by its own inner decay, where the systemic illness of the frontal battlefield rotted into its most complete specimen.Second Battle of Changsha (1941)1941.09In the autumn of 1941, the Japanese Eleventh Army, roughly 100,000 strong, attacked Changsha again. Because the Ninth War Area's command communications had been decrypted and its armies were committed one after another only to be defeated in detail, Changsha fell for several days; afterward, both sides nevertheless declared "victory": the Chinese side called it the "Second Great Victory of Changsha," while the Japanese side called it the "completion of the objective of Operation Ka."Third Battle of Changsha (1941–42)1941.12After the outbreak of the Pacific War, Japanese forces attacked Changsha for a third time in support of the Hong Kong operation; Xue Yue used the "Heavenly Furnace tactics" to lure the enemy into stalling below the city walls and then encircle it from all sides, and Japanese forces retreated in collapse after exhausting their ammunition and food--amid the Allies' line-wide defeats after Pearl Harbor, Changsha was the first victory.Yunnan–Burma Theater (1942–45)1942.02To preserve the last international transfusion line, one hundred thousand Chinese troops went abroad to fight for the first time: the opening campaign collapsed, and tens of thousands died in the rain forests of the Savage Mountains; two years later they returned, exchanging bodies for feet of ground at Songshan and Tengchong, and reopened the road. This was the only overseas theater of the War of Resistance, and the first counteroffensive Chinese troops won as an Allied army.Defense of Toungoo1942.03The first battle fought by Chinese troops after crossing the national border: in a small city on the Burmese plain, the nine thousand men of the 200th Division held off a Japanese division for twelve days, covered the British withdrawal and the deployment of the main force, and then withdrew as an intact formation on the eve before the encirclement closed. The first battle already demonstrated that this army could fight with method on foreign ground.Battle of Yenangyaung1942.04One regiment of Chinese soldiers brought more than seven thousand British troops, with their vehicles, out of encirclement in the Burmese oilfields -- the first successful rescue of Allied forces by Chinese troops beyond China's borders. Among the British who were saved, some remembered it for the rest of their lives; in the official histories, the scale of this battle has been argued over on both sides for decades.Retreat Through the Savage Mountains (※)1942.05.01Once Lashio was lost, the road home for the one hundred thousand men of the Expeditionary Force was gone: tens of thousands under Du Yuming's command were ordered to cross the primeval rain forest of the Hukawng Valley and return to China, and in the rainy season, among leeches, miasma, and hunger, more men died in the forest over two or three months than were killed in the whole Burma campaign. This was the quietest and most grievous passage on Whence We Came: the enemy scarcely fired a shot.Battle of Zhejiang–Jiangxi (1942)1942.05.15After the B-25 crews from the Doolittle Raid crash-landed in Zhejiang and were rescued by Chinese civilians, Japanese forces launched the Zhejiang–Jiangxi operation: they took out airfields, struck the Zhejiang–Jiangxi railway, and, during their withdrawal, released biological weapons and carried out retaliatory village massacres along the line; the bill for bombing Tokyo was sent to Zhejiang's civilians.Siege of Qinyuan1942.11Japanese forces occupied Qinyuan county seat, and all 80,000 people in the county, under Party organization, collectively emptied it out: for two and a half years, the occupying forces held an empty city with no people, no grain, and no secure water supply, until in the end they withdrew on their own. A battle won without fighting a major battle: the most complete demonstration of the four words "people's war."Battle of Western Hubei1943.05In the early summer of 1943, the Japanese Eleventh Army drove west into the Qingjiang River basin and reached Shipai Fortress at the mouth of the Three Gorges, the last river-defense gate shielding Chongqing; Hu Lien's Eleventh Division held Shipai, and after the Japanese offensive stalled, the whole line withdrew. The Chinese side called it the "Great Victory of Western Hubei"; the Japanese side recorded it as a turn back after objectives had been achieved -- two ways of remembering the same battle remain side by side.North Burma Counteroffensive (incl. Myitkyina)1943.10The defeated soldiers who had crawled out of the Savage Mountains two years earlier changed into U.S. equipment, trained for a year and a half, and fought their way back along the river valleys where their comrades had been buried -- Hukawng, Mogaung, Myitkyina: for the first time, the Chinese Army in India pressed Japanese forces down with firepower. Revenge starting from a place of burial became a textbook case.Battle of Changde1943.11Eight thousand "Huben" troops held for sixteen days in a city bombed flat and burned out; when the city fell, only a little more than two hundred remained — and the division commander who broke out alive was sent to a military court after he returned.Battle of Cheqiao1944.03In spring 1944, the New Fourth Army's First Division assaulted the fortified town of Cheqiao and then struck relief forces in succession, capturing 24 Japanese soldiers in a single action -- the highest number of Japanese forces taken alive in any one engagement behind enemy lines; behind the lines in Central China, the war moved from enduring to striking, and the spring of counteroffensive began in this waterside market town in northern Jiangsu.Battle of Henan–Hunan–Guangxi (Japanese "Operation Ichi-Go")1944.04The largest offensive in the history of the Japanese Army, and the largest collapse on China's frontal battlefield since 1938: in the year when the whole world was counterattacking, China was retreating in great strides.Battle of Central Henan (1944)1944.04.17Henan was lost in thirty-seven days -- in some places, civilians did not help the Nationalist Army, but instead took guns from routed soldiers. The account of popular allegiance had already filled up before the military collapse arrived.Battle of Tengchong1944.05.11After crossing the four-thousand-meter Gaoligong Mountains, the Twentieth Group Army reduced Tengchong city to scorched ground cleared house by house -- forty-two days of street fighting, the defending force annihilated, and the first walled county seat China recovered was a city with scarcely a few intact houses left. Three months after the city was recovered, the National Martyrs Cemetery had already risen: the first cemetery for fallen soldiers that Chinese people built for this war.Fourth Battle of Changsha (1944)1944.05.27The same city, the same war-area commander, the same "Heavenly Furnace" - the first three times forged a myth; the fourth burned the city into it.Battle of Songshan1944.06.04A mountain on the west bank of the Nu River; an underground fortress Japanese forces had spent two years building; one thousand three hundred defenders. The Chinese Expeditionary Force fought for ninety-five days and suffered 7,700 casualties, and in the end used three tons of explosives to blow the main peak, men and works together, into the sky -- ten battles for Songshan, and the defenders wiped out to the last. For the first time, Chinese troops reduced a Japanese strongpoint to "gyokusai"; for the first time, too, they learned what it meant to buy meters with lives in a fortified assault.Battle of Longling1944.06.05The longest battle of the western Yunnan counteroffensive -- five months, three entries and three withdrawals. Longling was the crossroads between Songshan and Tengchong; Japanese reinforcements came up wave after wave from Mangshi, while the Expeditionary Force entered the city again and again only to be pushed out again. Only after Songshan was opened and Tengchong fell did Longling finally change hands. The campaign's outcome was ultimately decided by two other mountains.Defense of Hengyang1944.06.23A depleted remnant force of 17,000 men, still unreplenished, held off five Japanese divisions in succession for 47 days inside a city emptied by evacuation - the longest urban defensive battle on the Chinese battlefield.Battle of Guilin–Liuzhou1944.08The final leg of Operation Ichi-Go: Guilin and Liuzhou fell on the same day, Japanese forces once drove as far as Dushan in Guizhou, only a few hundred kilometers from Chongqing; the transport corridor had been "opened," but the war was already nearly lost.Battle of Western Hunan (Xuefeng Mountains)1945.04In the spring and summer of 1945, the Japanese forces' last large-scale offensive drove toward Zhijiang airfield; in the Xuefeng Mountains, Chinese forces held them point by point, encircled them, and drove them back -- the frontal battlefield's last major campaign closed in complete victory.[Foreign war on Chinese soil] Soviet August Storm Offensive (1945)1945.08Three days after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, 1.5 million Soviet troops poured into China's Northeast from three directions and crushed the Kwantung Army in little more than ten days -- the last great battle between foreign powers fought on Chinese soil. It ended fourteen years of occupation, and also emptied the Northeast's factories and decided the first chessboard of the civil war. Liberation and new trouble came from the same army.

Sources and Open Questions

Sources: *History of the Eighth Route Army* and *History of the New Fourth Army* (Academy of Military Sciences); the Japanese Defense Agency War History Office's *Public-Order War in North China* (two volumes, the first source to read against); base-area newspapers such as *Jinchaji Daily* (searchable on literature platforms); overseas studies by Qi Xisheng, Mark Selden, and others; source collections on Shangrao Concentration Camp and the Southern Anhui Incident.

Open questions: the various bases for troop strength and base-area population; statistical boundaries for Japanese-puppet forces killed and wounded; source wording for the cage policy; quotation from Zuo Quan's family letter; troop strength and prisoner figures for the Southern Anhui Incident; texts of the conflicting surrender orders; annual force disposition table for Japanese forces in North China; Luochuan Conference records and original resolution text; telegrams around the reorganization arguing for concentrating forces to fight mobile warfare; date and source of the fixed formulation "basically guerrilla warfare, while not relaxing mobile warfare under favorable conditions"; the timing and amounts of the National Government's decreasing pay and equipment issued to the Eighth Route Army.