Battle of Guilin–Liuzhou

• 1. Introduction

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  The Battle of Guilin-Liuzhou put two of southern China's most storied cities in the crosshairs of the largest Japanese land offensive of the entire Second Sino-Japanese War. On the 1st of November, when Japanese forces began their assault on Guilin, only 20,000 Chinese troops stood in the city to meet them. The question the rest of this documentary will answer is not simply whether those soldiers could hold the line. It is why the Chinese government chose to fight a battle it already knew it would lose, and what the cost of that choice turned out to be.

• 2. Operation Ichigo's Southern Strike

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  The Battle of Guilin-Liuzhou was the third and final chapter of the Battle of Henan-Hunan-Guangxi, a massive Japanese campaign formally called Operation Ichigo. Japan's strategic aims were twofold. The first was to stitch together the scattered pockets of Japanese-held territory across mainland China into one continuous corridor. The second was to destroy the airbases in the region that were sheltering aircraft of the United States Army Air Forces, which had been hitting Japanese positions from those fields.

  In August, after completing battles in Hunan and Guangdong, the Japanese 11th Army turned toward Guilin and the 23rd Army turned toward Liuzhou, advancing on both cities at once. The forces they would face were already spent. The Chinese defenders in the area were largely survivors from the earlier Battle of Hengyang, units that had been ground down in heavy fighting before being pushed toward Guilin. By the time Japanese pressure arrived, those battered remnants were all that stood between the advancing columns and the city.

• 3. A City Prepared to Fall

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  General Bai Chongxi, a Muslim general commanding the Guangxi provincial troops, had spent considerable effort fortifying the city. Guilin's hills were threaded with trenches, its approaches studded with pillboxes and barbed wire. General Joseph Stilwell, who had a friendly relationship with Bai, went to great pains to route American munitions to Bai's forces.

  Yet the Chinese government in Chongqing already accepted that Guilin could not be saved. The decision to fight on regardless was driven by domestic political calculation rather than military logic. To manage public perception, the government sent food and supplies to the besieged garrison. Most civilians had already read the situation clearly and fled the city weeks before the battle began. Those who remained watched Guilin scorched heavily by fire as the defense stiffened and then collapsed.

• 4. Ten Days, Two Cities

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  After ten days of intense fighting, Japanese forces occupied Guilin. On that same day, they entered Liuzhou as well. The speed with which both cities fell set off a rapid Chinese retreat across the wider region. Fighting continued in sporadic bursts as the Japanese extended their grip, and by the 24th of November they controlled 75 counties across Guangxi, roughly two-thirds of the province's total area.

  The human toll fell most heavily on civilians. Japanese forces are said to have killed 215,000 civilians in reprisal and during crossfire, and to have wounded more than 431,000 others across the territory they seized. For the National Revolutionary Army, the fall of the two cities triggered a collapse in morale among the broader force. Most NRA troops abandoned their positions and retreated without ever engaging the enemy, leaving behind tremendous quantities of equipment and men.

• 5. Strategic Irony

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  Japan's destruction of the USAAF airbases in the Guilin-Liuzhou corridor did not achieve the effect the operation's planners had hoped for. American aircraft could still reach the Japanese home islands from bases elsewhere in the region, so the air threat was not eliminated, only displaced. The campaign's final balance sheet contained a paradox that its architects had not fully anticipated.

  By overrunning such a large swath of Guangxi, Japanese forces took on responsibility for defending a territory that sharply stretched their lines. The area under Japanese control expanded faster than the manpower available to hold it. That thinning of Japanese defensive depth would set up favorable conditions for subsequent Chinese counterattacks, a consequence that made Operation Ichigo's apparent success considerably more complicated than the fall of two cities suggested. The Battle of Guilin-Liuzhou stands as one of the 22 major engagements between the National Revolutionary Army and the Imperial Japanese Army during the war, and historians have called it one of the most devastating Chinese losses of the entire conflict.