Battle of Taierzhuang

• 1. Introduction

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  The Battle of Taierzhuang, fought in the spring of 1938, began with a desperate defense inside a walled town on the eastern bank of the Grand Canal of China. For months before the battle, Japan's armies had swept through Shanghai and Nanjing, leaving the Chinese military with its air force and navy virtually destroyed. No one expected what was about to happen at a frontier garrison town northeast of Xuzhou.

  The questions the battle raises are urgent. How did an outgunned Chinese force, fighting in rubble and smoke, hold off a Japanese army that had seemed unstoppable? What made Taierzhuang different from every engagement that had come before it? And what did the outcome mean for a country that had been losing, badly, for years?

• 2. Before the First Shot

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  On the 30th of January 1938, the Japanese military high command concluded that no new offensive operations should be conducted until August. Emperor Hirohito's own assessment was even more cautious: he believed it would take at least a year to consolidate the territory already seized before any further push could begin. That careful calculus would unravel almost immediately.

  Chiang Kai-shek, meanwhile, had already withdrawn China's ambassador Xu Shiying from Japan on the 20th of February. Japan pulled its own ambassador Kawagoe Shigeru the following day. Chiang had also resigned from his post as Premier of the Executive Yuan, giving himself fully to the war effort. These were not the gestures of a government looking for a way out.

  The Japanese units in China, buoyed by the fall of Nanjing, ignored their high command's restraint and pushed forward anyway. The Imperial Japanese Army drove northwards through Jiangsu, Shandong, and Henan, pursuing the Chinese forces that had scattered after Shanghai. Three Japanese divisions were converging on Xuzhou, the critical railway junction where two major lines crossed, and from there they planned to drive toward Wuhan and break the Chinese government's will to fight.

  Xuzhou was more than a railway hub. It was the headquarters of the KMT's 5th War Zone, commanded by Li Zongren, who would soon demonstrate an instinct for the kind of war the terrain demanded.

• 3. The Myth Begins to Crack

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  The first sign that the Japanese advance could be stopped came not at Taierzhuang but at Linyi, further northeast. The Japanese 5th Division, commanded by Seishiro Itagaki, had landed amphibiously at Qingdao and was pushing southwest along the Taiwei Highway. Blocking their path was a single Chinese division, the 39th, part of the 3rd Group Army under Pang Bingxun. The 39th's five regiments managed to delay the Japanese advance toward Linyi for over a month.

  On the 12th of March, Zhang Zizhong's 59th Army crossed the Yi River and hit the Japanese left flank. Fighting from the 13th to the 18th of March, the combined Chinese pressure drove the Japanese out of the Linyi region entirely. The Japanese 5th Division lost close to two entire battalions. It was an outcome that shocked IJA headquarters and humiliated Itagaki personally. The defeat at Linyi shattered the idea that Japanese forces were simply unbeatable in the field.

  To the north, the Japanese 10th Division under Rensuke Isogai had fared better. KMT General Han Fuju had ordered his own troops to abandon their posts, allowing the Japanese to walk into Jinan unopposed. But Han's insubordination had consequences. Chiang had him executed, and the message cascaded through every rank of the Chinese military: discipline would now be enforced at any cost. That shift in command culture was about to matter enormously inside the walls of Taierzhuang.

• 4. Room by Room

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  The 31st Division under General Chi Fengcheng reached Taierzhuang on the 22nd of March and was ordered to hold until the rest of the 2nd Army Group arrived. On the 24th of March, a Japanese force of 5,000 men attacked. A 300-strong contingent breached the north-eastern gate at 8pm but was forced back into the Chenghuang temple. The Chinese set fire to the temple, killing the entire Japanese force inside.

  By the 29th of March, the Japanese had finally breached the town wall. What followed was unlike anything the Chinese military had experienced. The fighting in Taierzhuang's streets was described by one participant: "The battle continued day and night. The flames lit up the sky. Often all that separated our forces was a single wall. The soldiers would beat holes in the masonry to snipe at each other. We would be fighting for days over a single building, causing dozens of fatalities."

  Historian Peter Harmsen drew a direct comparison to the urban battles Europe would later see. In the cramped lanes and courtyards, Japanese advantages in artillery and air power were rendered useless. When either was deployed in the congested melee, as many Japanese died as Chinese. The fight fell entirely to infantry armed with rifles, pistols, hand grenades, bayonets, and knives. General Chi Fengcheng's battle memories, recorded by Sheng Cheng, described soldiers digging through the same wall from opposite sides simultaneously, dropping grenades through rooftops, and sometimes biting each other in the dark.

  At 4am on the 1st of April, the Japanese attacked with 11 tanks. Chinese defenders armed with German-made 37mm Pak-36 antitank guns destroyed 8 of the vehicles at point-blank range. In separate skirmishes, Chinese troops from the "dare to die" corps strapped explosives to their bodies and threw themselves under Japanese tanks. Out of an initial squad of 57 Chinese soldiers tasked with capturing a single building, only 10 survived.

  By early April, the Japanese held two thirds of Taierzhuang. But the Chinese still controlled the South Gate, and through it they continued to resupply their own troops while systematically cutting off Japanese resupply lines. The slow attrition was bleeding the Japanese attackers dry.

• 5. The Encirclement

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  While the town ground itself apart in close combat, the commanders of the 5th War Zone were executing a larger design. Having consulted their German advisors, they had prepared a double envelopment of the extended Japanese forces. The plan depended on Tang Enbo's 20th Corps, which had been holding back from the fighting inside the town.

  On the 26th of March, Tang's corps attacked Japanese forces at Yixian, killing half the defenders and routing the rest. Tang then pivoted south and struck the Japanese flank northeast of Taierzhuang. Simultaneously, two divisions of the Chinese 55th Army crossed the Grand Canal and cut the railway line near Lincheng. The supply line to the Japanese units inside the town was severed. On the 1st of April, when the Japanese 5th Division sent a brigade to relieve the encircled 10th Division, Tang blocked the advance and attacked from the rear, pushing them into the encirclement rather than out of it.

  The Nationalist Air Force contributed to the operation as well, deploying squadrons from the 3rd and 4th Pursuit Groups with roughly 30 aircraft, mainly Soviet models, in bombing raids against Japanese positions. Japanese attempts to airdrop supplies into the encirclement failed; most of the packages fell into Chinese hands.

  By the 5th of April, the Japanese units inside Taierzhuang were surrounded by seven Chinese divisions to the north and four more to the south. Without ammunition, fuel, food, or water, and with their troops exhausted after more than a week of intense fighting, the position had become untenable. Japanese artillery could not return fire for lack of shells. Their tanks sat immobile without fuel. Infantry were reduced progressively from machine gun fire to rifle fire to bayonet charges.

• 6. Collapse and Casualties

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  On the 7th of April, the Japanese line broke. Both the 5th and 10th Divisions retreated, leaving behind thousands of their dead. Roughly 2,000 Japanese soldiers fought their way out of the encirclement. Some of those who escaped committed hara kiri.

  Casualty figures from the battle vary widely depending on the source. Frank Dorn, an American military officer stationed in China between 1934 and 1939, counted some 16,000 Japanese soldiers killed in action on the battlefield. American historian Stephen MacKinnon estimates between 15,000 and 20,000 Japanese dead. British historian Rana Mitter gives a lower estimate of roughly 8,000 Japanese killed, a figure shared by Western historians Richard B. Frank and Hans Van De Ven. Peter Harmsen and Micheal Clodfelter estimate 20,000 Japanese killed and wounded combined, including 8,000 killed.

  The Japanese abandoned enormous quantities of material. Frank Dorn recorded 40 tanks, over 70 armored cars, and 100 trucks of various sizes left on the battlefield, along with dozens of artillery pieces and thousands of machine guns and rifles. Much of this equipment was collected by Chinese forces for future use.

  Chinese losses were roughly equal in scale. Peter Harmsen and Stephen MacKinnon put Chinese casualties at around 20,000 in total. In General Chi Fengcheng's 31st Division alone, only 2,000 men out of an initial strength of 9,000 were fit for roll call when it was over. Taierzhuang itself was almost completely destroyed.

  Japanese combat reports attributed the withdrawal to command and communication failures and did not acknowledge an ammunition shortage. A later Japanese historical team listed about 2,130 killed and 8,580 wounded for the entire Xuzhou campaign, including the Taierzhuang area. Chinese historian Jiang Keshi, working from Japanese records, estimated the total Japanese casualties at Taierzhuang specifically at fewer than 2,500, based on surviving partial records of the 10th Division's Seya Task Force and estimates for the 5th Division's Sakamoto Task Force.

• 7. What the Victory Meant

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  Japan initially denied the defeat and spent days ridiculing reports of the battle. The New York Times covered it anyway. In Hankou and other Chinese cities, the celebrations were unlike anything since the war had begun.

  Li Zongren later called the victory "the first happy occasion since the war of resistance had started," and said Taierzhuang had become "a symbol of national renaissance." General Feng Yuxiang, writing in the Ta Kung Pao newspaper, compared the trapped Japanese forces to "soft-shelled turtles in a closed jar."

  The battle did not turn the tide of the larger war. But it proved something that had seemed impossible for months: Japanese armies, given the right ground and the right discipline, could be beaten by Chinese forces. It broke what participants and historians alike called the myth of Imperial Japanese military invincibility. The strategic value of Taierzhuang's cramped stone streets, its Grand Canal position, and the terminal of the local branch railway had made it, unexpectedly, the place where that myth ended. In 2006, the site was designated a national priority protected location as number 981 of its category.