Battle of Hengyang

• 1. Introduction

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  The Battle of Hengyang lasted 47 days in the summer of 1944, and when it ended, Japanese casualties far exceeded the total number of Chinese troops who had defended the city. That fact alone tells you something extraordinary happened here. A major Chinese newspaper of the day compared the battle to Stalingrad. Japanese military historians called it a "Battle of Ryojun in South China", equating it to the most arduous engagement of the Russo-Japanese War. One account described it as "the most savage battle ever fought in the smallest battlefield with the greatest casualties in the military history of the world". What made Hengyang worth fighting over so ferociously? What kind of army held out for 47 days, outnumbered and outgunned, in a city of 23 square kilometers? And when the city finally fell on the 8th of August 1944, what did the survivors do next?

• 2. The City Japan Had to Take

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  Hengyang sits in Hunan Province in an oval basin ringed by mountains and hills, at the point where two rivers merge into the Xiang River, a major tributary of the Yangtze. That geography made it a crossroads for centuries, but the 1930s gave it an entirely new layer of importance. Japanese occupation of Shanghai, Nanjing, and Wuhan during that decade forced China's industries to move inland, and the Chiang Kai-shek government chose Hengyang as a light industry center. By the beginning of 1944, both banks of the Xiang River for ten miles had filled with mills and factories. The city earned the nickname "Little Shanghai". Two major railway lines, the Wuhan-Guangzhou and the Hunan-Guangxi, converged there as well, making Hengyang the gateway to Guangxi, Guizhou, Yunnan, and Sichuan. A Chinese failure to hold Hengyang could put Japanese troops on a path through Guilin and westward toward Guizhou, from where they could strike directly at Chongqing, the Chinese wartime capital. Japan grasped this logic before the battle even began. In January 1944, the Japanese military plan known as "Ichigo" was drawn up and approved by the emperor. It had two phases: first seize control of the Beijing-Wuhan Railway, then take over the Wuhan-Guangzhou and Hunan-Guangxi lines. Ichigo formally launched on the 17th of April. Japanese troops met hardly any effective Chinese resistance in the following six weeks. Changsha fell on the 18th of June, and two days later, when the order came to take Hengyang, Lieutenant General Isamu Yokoyama expected the battle to last no more than a day.

• 3. Fang Xianjue and the Tenth Army

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  Lieutenant General Fang Xianjue commanded the 10th Army of the Chinese National Revolutionary Army, and the story of how he came to lead the defense of Hengyang is itself a portrait of loyalty tested by politics. The army's roots went back to the 190th Division, which had earned the title "Division of Bravery and Loyalty" at the Battle of Wuhan in 1938. After a decisive role in the Third Battle of Changsha at the end of 1941, the 10th Army received the honorary title "Mt. Tai Army", after one of the Five Sacred Mountains of China. Fang himself became famous in Hunan at that battle. As a major general commanding the 10th Reserve Division, he wrote his "last" letter to his wife after promising to hold his battle lines for a week. Changsha Daily published it under the headline "Determined to Defend Changsha to his Death, Commander Fang Made his Will" on the 2nd of January 1942. The political trouble came afterward. A deputy commander who was a confidante of General Xue, the supreme commander of the Ninth War Area, resented Fang's promotion. In the Battle of Changde the following year, that deputy delayed carrying out Fang's orders, contributing to a failed rescue mission. Fang threatened to execute him. Xue then convinced Chiang Kai-shek to remove Fang from command. When Japan launched the Hunan Campaign, Fang's chosen replacement declined the appointment. Xue asked Fang to return; Fang refused. On the night of the 29th of May 1944, Chiang Kai-shek called Fang directly from Chongqing and ordered him to resume command and deploy to Hengyang immediately. He was told to prepare to defend the city for ten days to two weeks. The army Fang inherited was understrength. On paper it had four divisions, but in reality only seven regiments' worth of fighting strength. One regiment of the 54th Division stationed in Hengyang had its commander allow two battalions to leave after the airfield was lost on the third day of battle, leaving only a single battalion behind. The actual combat strength recorded by Hengyang historian Pei Xiao was 16,275 men. Before the battle, Chiang Kai-shek sent his head of Logistics to Hengyang with orders to draw from nearby military warehouses. The 10th Army received 5.3 million machine gun bullets, 3,200 mortar shells, and 28,000 hand grenades.

• 4. The Defenses and the Evacuation

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  The official order to defend Hengyang reached the 10th Army from the National Military Council on the 31st of May, and troops began marching to the city that night. Hengyang itself occupied 23 square kilometers, but the city proper was only 0.5 kilometers east to west and 1.6 kilometers north to south, with rivers to the east and north. After two days of terrain reconnaissance, Fang concluded that Japanese forces would most likely attack from the south and southwest. He deployed his two full-strength divisions, the 10th and 3rd, west of the Xiang River, with the 10th Reserve Division at the major frontline in the south and the stronger 3rd Division at a secondary line on the north and west ready to provide relief. For the rice fields and marshlands on the north and west, he ordered ponds and fields connected to make large flooded areas, with pillboxes on the footpaths between them. For the rolling hills on the south and southwest, he ordered bunkers linked by trenches, with machine guns on summits flanking saddles to create killing zones over open ground. All hillsides facing the enemy were to be cut to sheer cliffs. Ditches five meters deep and five meters wide, which his men called "Fang's Moats", were dug along the south and southwest, filled with water or lined with spikes at the bottom. Beyond the moats, two or three layers of barbed wire and abatises. Mines covered most open approaches. While Fang fortified the city, he also ordered it emptied. When Changsha fell on the 18th of June, he decided to evacuate all 300,000 Hengyang residents. The army requested free rides from the railways, and staff members went to the stations to help the old and young board. Reuters journalist Graham Barrow witnessed the evacuation: "I was lying asleep by the railway station one night in the rain, then I woke up because there was a train going by. They were stuffed on roofs and in boxcars. They had lashed themselves to couplings between cars. There were refugees on the cowcatcher in front; underneath the trains they had laid some boards across the rods between the wheels. They stretched their mattresses on the boards and there they were, lying one on top of the other between the rods and trains." Within four days and nights, all 300,000 residents were out. Before leaving, the mayor of Hengyang called for volunteers to stay and assist the defenders. 32,000 citizens signed up, organized into six teams covering munitions transport, damaged works repair, firefighting, stretcher-bearing, care of wounded soldiers, and collecting corpses.

• 5. 47 Days of Combat

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  At eight in the evening of the 22nd of June, the advance troops of the Japanese 68th Division arrived at the eastern outskirts of Hengyang. Early the next morning, on the 23rd, the 68th Division was attempting to cross the Lei River when a Chinese battalion from the 190th Division opened fire on the boats. The battle had begun. In the first days, the Japanese Air Service kept bombing the city and its infantry deployed poison gas repeatedly. The tactics that emerged over the following weeks established a grim rhythm: Japanese forces would bomb with aircraft, shell with artillery, use incendiary bombs and poison gas, then send infantry in waves of roughly a hundred men against Chinese positions. The Chinese would shelter in bunkers and trenches until the artillery began to fall behind their lines, then emerge to shoot, throw hand grenades, or fight hand to hand. On the evening of the 29th of June, after employing flamethrowers and poison gas, Japanese forces added a new tactic: to the sound of bugles, conchs, bull horns, porcelain pipes, gongs, drums, and shouts of "Kill! Kill!", herds of bulls and horses with daggers bound to their heads were set on fire and stampeded toward the Chinese lines. The Chinese were thrown into chaos briefly, but commanders deployed reserves and organized countercharges. The New York Times on the 7th of July 1944 reported the Japanese use of gas. The fighting at Mt. Zhangjia in mid-July was among the most brutal. For three days and nights from the 11th to the 13th of July, waves of Japanese troops assaulted the heights under air and artillery cover, with each side driving the other back through what survivors described as cruelest stabbing, slashing, and bayoneting. On the night of the 13th of July, surviving Chinese soldiers piled up their own dead and covered them with dirt, turning the heaps into parapets. Colonel Kurose Heiichi of the Japanese 133rd Regiment had unfurled the regimental banner and declared: "So long as one of us lives, this banner must be planted on Mt. Zhangjia." By the time the Japanese 116th Division's 133rd Regiment took a small mound south of the city hospital, one memoir recorded the cost at 2,750 lives, leaving only 250 survivors in that regiment. By the end of July, the Chinese had roughly 3,000 combat troops remaining: fewer than 500 from the 10th Reserve Division, fewer than 2,000 from the 3rd Division, 400 from the 190th Division, and only fragments of the 54th Division and artillery. Food, medicine, and ammunition were running out. Rice buried underground had been destroyed by Japanese napalm; what remained was burnt rice cooked in salt. Cats, rats, fish, and shrimp had long been consumed. One account from Company Commander Xiaoxia Zang described the ammunition shortage plainly: "I found out they had long run out of 81mm bombs. We now only have 82mm ones, and the non-combatant staff from headquarters have been using bricks and rocks to grind them down by 1mm. They've been working hard, their hands blistered and bleeding, but could never keep up with the demand." By the 5th of August, Colonel Kurose Heiichi of the 133rd Regiment, just promoted to major general four days earlier, prepared to lead the few hundred men left in his regiment on a suicidal charge. His division commander stopped him. At 3:00 pm on the 5th of August, General Fang gathered his four division commanders. All agreed they could hold at most three more days without reinforcements. They discussed breaking through the Japanese encirclement, but someone recalled that a division commander who had broken out at the end of the Battle of Changde, leaving wounded soldiers behind, had been court-martialed. They wept, recognizing they could not abandon more than 6,000 wounded comrades. They chose to stay and die with the city. The end came on the morning of the 8th of August. Japanese forces pushed into the 10th Army's headquarters at the Central Bank basement. All telephone lines had been cut. General Fang drew his pistol to kill himself. The Baggage Regiment Commander and his aide-de-camp knocked it from his hand as it fired. At five in the morning, the Japanese broke in. General Fang, four division commanders, and the remaining staff were captured and taken to the Catholic church in the south of the city.

• 6. The Failed Relief

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  Chiang Kai-shek had promised General Fang relief from both the air force and ground armies. His vision was that Chinese forces would surround the besieging Japanese and the defenders and reinforcements would crush them together. On the 12th of July, a day after the Japanese second offensive began, Chiang ordered two armies to relieve Hengyang. The 62nd Army was to attack from the southwest, while the 79th was to push from the northwest. By the 14th of July, one division of the 79th had fought its way to Xinqiao, ten miles from Hengyang. By the 17th of July, a division of the 62nd had taken Mt. Yumu, six miles out, and pressed on to positions two to three miles from the city walls. Then the Japanese halted their second offensive on the 20th of July and turned more forces to fight the relief columns. The 62nd Army retreated to Mt. Yumu. The National Military Council ordered reinforcements in a much sterner tone, deploying three additional armies. On the 23rd of July, Japan began breaking Chinese radio codes, obtaining important orders and maneuver instructions from the Military Council and army headquarters. In the weeks that followed, Chinese reinforcement columns frequently ran into large Japanese blocking forces. Renowned war correspondent Theodore H. White witnessed the passivity of the 151st Division of the 62nd Army firsthand. Division officers told him they were certain they would break through the next day. He heard guns and shells that second night but saw no attack materialize. On the third night, the division stopped attacking and prepared to shift into the hills. White and Reuters journalist Graham Barrow left in disappointment. When the 10th Army's headquarters fell in the early morning of the 8th of August, most reinforcements were still around ten miles away. Only a small force from the 79th Army was trying to take Mt. Gao, a forward position about two miles from the besieged army. A Chinese National Defense review later admitted: "Our military applied our forces one by one, failing to bring the maximum power into play. While our enemy rapidly gathered their superior forces, we entered the battlefields slowly one after another." The 62nd corps alone suffered 5,095 casualties in the three-week relief attempt, including the death of deputy divisional commander Yu Ziwu.

• 7. American Air and Ground Support

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  By the Lei River on the east side of Hengyang lay an airfield first built in 1934. When the American 14th Air Force was formally established in March 1943, the airfield was significantly upgraded for heavy bombers and became the base for the Chinese-American Composite Wing, which inherited the Flying Tigers nickname. At its peak, the airfield held 400 planes, including bombers, fighters, and photo reconnaissance aircraft, with more than 2,000 pilots and ground personnel. As early as the 6th of May 1944, the Hengyang squadron pilots began intensive bombing and strafing missions, hitting Japanese military storage areas, supply barges, and gunboats, and engaging in dogfights. On the 17th of June, Japanese forces bombed the air base heavily and the squadron evacuated. They flew back the following day, the 22nd of June, to bomb their own base so the advancing Japanese could not use it. Throughout the 47-day battle, the 14th Air Force continued attacking Japanese supply lines along the Yangtze and Xiang rivers and supporting Chinese defensive positions. The Chinese defenders stated plainly: "Hengyang would not have held out for 47 days without Chennault and his Flying Tigers." Ground troops gave particular credit to Brigadier General Earl S. Hoag, who commanded the India-China Division of the Air Transport Command. Visiting Hengyang a week before the battle on a supply inspection tour, Hoag put the Chinese defenders in direct radio communication with Zhijiang Airport, which could relay their messages to Chongqing. American missionaries and medical staff at Ren Ji Hospital, run by the Presbyterian church, had also been active in the city before the battle. The hospital evacuated in early June 1944, but the equipment and medicines left behind, particularly sulfa drugs, helped wounded soldiers recover quickly. The Chinese defenders credited this as an indirect factor in the city holding out as long as it did. On the 8th of July, the Chinese Composite Wing of the 14th Air Force airdropped consolation items to the besieged troops: towels, soap, and tiger balm.

• 8. Captivity, Escape, and Recognition

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  After the city fell, General Fang, Chief of Staff Sun, the four division commanders, and headquarters officers were imprisoned in the one intact building left standing: a Catholic church near Huangcha Hill, which had survived bombing because a painting of the Italian National Flag was on its roof. On the afternoon of the 8th of August, an envoy from the 11th Imperial Japanese Army visited General Fang at the church. After confirming that the 10th Army had not surrendered unconditionally, Fang made three requests: guarantee the safety of all surviving soldiers and officers, provide the wounded with medical treatment and bury the dead in Chinese tradition, and not break up the structure of the 10th Army. The envoy, on behalf of Lieutenant General Yokoyama, expressed respect: "Your bravery was not only admired by the Japanese troops here, but also known to our base and even the emperor back in Japan." He accepted all three requests. In practice, none were honored. There was no food or medicine. Captives who could walk were forced into the rice fields to harvest. Only officers above the rank of captain had any chance to see a doctor, and even then treatment was rudimentary. Japan then pressured Fang to lead a puppet unit they named "Xianhe" Army, the characters drawn from Fang's own name and a Japanese word for harmony. Fang refused. The Japanese killed hospitalized Chinese soldiers as leverage. Chief of Staff Sun proposed a different approach: pretend to accept, wait for Japanese vigilance to relax, then escape. At the end of September, the Xianhe Army was formally set up. On the stormy night of the 9th of October, Sun and Commander Zhou of the 3rd Division climbed out of windows and escaped. A division commander followed on a later day. On the night of the 18th of November, General Fang fled. As more and more men escaped, Fang's own getaway inspired even seriously wounded soldiers who had been contemplating suicide to try. Many made their way to Chongqing; others joined local guerrillas to fight on. When Chiang Kai-shek received word of Hengyang's fall, he wrote in his diary: "This sorrow of mine has never been so intense and penetrating." He ordered that on the 20th of August all military forces of the nation remain silent for three minutes to honor those from the 10th Army who had died. All five top commanders received the Blue Sky and White Sun, the military's highest medal, a rare honor. The medals for division commanders Ge and Zhou had already been approved and delivered onto the battlefield by air before the city fell.