1938 Yellow River flood

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  On the 13th of June 1938, the first wave of the Yellow River flood struck Zhongmu County in Henan province. No storm had caused it. No dam had failed from age or neglect. The flood had been planned, authorized, and executed by China's own military commanders as a weapon of war.

  The operation had a name in military records: Huayuankou Juedi Shijian, meaning the Huayuankou Dam Burst Incident. Its architects hoped it would slow the Imperial Japanese Armed Forces long enough to protect China's rear. What it also did was reshape the Yellow River's course for nearly a decade and cost hundreds of thousands of civilian lives.

  How does a government decide to flood its own people? What exactly did the flood achieve, and at what cost? And how did the truth of who caused it remain buried under official denials for years?

• 2. The Logic of Deliberate Destruction

  ›

  Alexander von Falkenhausen, commissioned by the Chinese in 1935 to write a strategic report on the coming Sino-Japanese War, recommended a Yellow River flood as a defensive tool. That recommendation was absorbed into China's National Defense Strategy of 1937, well before the fighting reached Henan.

  The idea had deep roots in Chinese military history. Deliberate flooding of enemy positions had been recorded as far back as 225 BC, and again in AD 219, 918, 923, 1128, 1232, 1234, 1642, and 1926. Many officers in the Chinese National Army had personal experience of it: the warlord Wu Peifu had used exactly this tactic against them during the 1926 Northern Expedition.

  By May 1938, the suggestion of flooding was circulating among various officers. The Battle of Xuzhou had ended in Chinese defeat, placing the Zhengzhou junction of the Beijing-Wuhan Railway within the Japanese army's reach. On the 1st of June 1938, Commander-in-chief Chiang Kai-shek formally sanctioned opening the dikes near Zhengzhou at a military meeting.

  The strategy was described internally as "using water as a substitute for soldiers" - a phrase rendered in Chinese as Yishuidarbing. The original plan targeted the dike at Zhaokou, but difficulties there forced a change of location. Workers instead tunneled into the dike at Huayuankou on the Yellow River's south bank, breaching it on the 5th and the 7th of June 1938.

• 3. Three Strategic Goals

  ›

  NRA commanders had three distinct strategic intentions, each addressing a different theater of the war. The first concerned supply lines from the northwest. From August 1937 to March 1941, the Soviet Union sent military supplies to the Chinese National Army along the Longhai railway through Shaanxi. Once Germany stopped exporting arms to China in April 1938, the Soviet Union became China's largest arms supplier until the United States entered the war. Flooding Henan formed a barrier that protected the Shaanxi section of that critical railway.

  The second goal involved the geography of interior China. Shaanxi had served throughout Chinese military history as the primary route into Sichuan, a connection so well-known it had its own historical term: Shudao. Sichuan mattered because Chongqing, the wartime capital, sat there, along with China's entire southwestern home front. By flooding the land and railway tracks between Henan and Shaanxi, NRA commanders made it dramatically harder for Japan to mass troops for an inland drive.

  The third intention was to destroy rail infrastructure across a wide front. The floods wrecked tracks and bridges of the Beijing-Wuhan Railway, the Tianjin-Pukou Railway, and the Longhai Railway simultaneously. With those lines damaged, the Japanese army could not rapidly move forces or supplies across the theaters of North, Central, and Northwest China.

  In the short term, the NRA also exploited the chaos directly. The Japanese 14th division was swamped in Zhongmu County and could not reassemble until the 23rd of June. The isolated 16th division was crushed by the Chinese National Army in Weishi County on the 24th of June and could only reassemble on the 7th of July.

• 4. What the Flood Actually Did

  ›

  Japanese Operation 5 never captured Shaanxi, Sichuan, or Chongqing. By that measure, the flood achieved what its planners had promised.

  The Zhengzhou junction of the Beijing-Wuhan Railway was denied to the Japanese. The flood also destroyed the Bengbu railway bridge of the Tianjin-Pukou Railway, a consequence that had not been planned. With both lines disabled, Japan could send neither troops nor supplies along those corridors.

  Most of the towns and transport lines that the flood covered had already fallen to the Japanese before the dikes broke. The flooding did not reclaim that territory, but it prevented Japan from consolidating control over it. Large portions became guerrilla zones instead.

  The Chinese Communists read the situation as a recruiting opportunity. Directing survivors' anger at a common enemy, they brought many flood refugees into their ranks. By the 1940s the flooded region had become a major guerrilla base known as the Yuwansu Base Area. The flood bought enough time, at minimum, for the Battle of Wuhan to be contested rather than preempted.

• 5. The Cost in Human Lives

  ›

  Water flowing from the breached dike at Huayuankou entered the Jialu River in Zhongmu County, then joined the Shaying River at the city of Zhoujiakou, and eventually reached the Huai River. Smaller rivers overflowed their banks along the entire route, spreading destruction through Henan, Anhui, and Jiangsu.

  Immediate drowning deaths were estimated by the China Academy of Sciences in 1995 at 89,000, while researcher Kuo Tai-chun in 2015 placed the figure at 30,000. The range between those numbers reflects genuine uncertainty rather than rounding. Total deaths from drowning combined with famine and plague were estimated at between 400,000 and 500,000 by Wang Zhibin in 1986 and by Bi Chunfu in 1995 - Bi being an editor at the Yellow River Conservancy Commission and Wang a researcher at the Second Historical Archives of China.

  The Nationalist government's own relief statistics from 1948 gave a much higher total of 893,303 deaths. That figure was discredited for its unspecified counting methodology and a questionable estimate of the Anhui province missing figure. Two early communist estimates from the 1950s placed total deaths at 470,000 and 500,000 respectively - lower than the Nationalist figure. Later communist sources generally adopted the 893,303 number, using it to portray the Nationalist government as inhumane.

  Bi Chunfu estimated that five million peasants were living on inundated land. Two early communist estimates from the 1950s echoed roughly similar numbers, placing the figure at 6.1 million and 5 million respectively. The Nationalist government had initially claimed 12 million, a figure inflated to stoke anti-Japanese public sentiment alongside the cover story that Japanese aerial bombing had caused the flood.

• 6. Years of Ruin

  ›

  A postwar report found that floods had inundated 32 percent of land and 45 percent of villages across 20 affected counties. The Yellow River stayed in its new, diverted course until January 1947.

  The flooded farmland did not quickly recover. When waters receded, thick layers of silt coated the soil, making much of it uncultivable. Crops had been destroyed, public structures and housing had collapsed, and irrigation channels lay in ruins. Survivors were left destitute. Five million civilians remained on inundated land through 1947.

  Work to repair the breach and return the Yellow River to its former course began in March 1946, conducted by the Kuomintang government with assistance from UNRRA. Workers completed initial repairs in June 1946, but large summer flows broke the new dams again. Further repairs succeeded, and the river was finally returned to its historical course in March 1947.

  The destruction also produced a lasting psychological effect on the population of the region. The Nationalist government was slow to provide disaster relief, a failure that intensified resentment. Inspired by the strategic result in Henan, forces on both the Chinese and Japanese sides subsequently destroyed dikes elsewhere in China, particularly along the Yangtze River.