Battle of Xuzhou

• 1. Introduction

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  The Battle of Xuzhou was a turning point in the Second Sino-Japanese War, fought over more than three months in early 1938 across the railways and cities of central China. At its heart lay a single rail junction: the crossing of the north-south Jinpu line with the Longhai line, China's main east-west artery running from Lanzhou all the way to Lianyungang. Whoever held Xuzhou held the key to movement across half the country.

  Chiang Kai-shek understood this. In late January 1938 he summoned a military conference at Wuchang and declared the defense of Xuzhou to be China's top strategic priority. What he could not have predicted was how the campaign would unfold: a string of bloody stalemates, one unexpected Chinese victory that lifted national morale, a masterly retreat through wheat fields by night, and then a catastrophic act of desperation that would drown an estimated four hundred thousand to five hundred thousand of his own people.

  How did three months of fighting along a railway system draw in hundreds of thousands of soldiers on each side? Why did the fall of Xuzhou become, paradoxically, the foundation for Chinese resistance at Wuhan? And what drove Chiang's commanders to breach the dikes of the Yellow River? Those are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. The Railway Stakes

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  Xuzhou's military value came from its geography, not its size. The city sat at the midpoint of the Jinpu Railway, the north-south line connecting Beijing to Pukou opposite Nanjing, and at the junction with the Longhai line. Control of both lines would give Japan unimpeded movement across central China; losing them would leave the Chinese heartland exposed.

  The Japanese plan was methodical. After their victory at Nanjing in late 1937, the North China Area Army intended to push south along the Jinpu line while the Eleventh Army pushed north from Shanghai's hinterland. The two forces were to converge at Xuzhou, then pivot west together toward Jiujiang and Wuhan. It was a strategy built on railway speed and the assumption that Chinese resistance would crack under pressure.

  Chiang's planners, drawing on the grand strategy of the Baoding military theorist Jiang Baili, intended to use that same railway network against the Japanese. The concept was "protracted warfare": lure the Japanese into overextended attacks, bleed them along the lines, and wear them down over the long term. An initial Chinese force of around eighty thousand troops was built up to three hundred thousand, positioned along both rail corridors to slow and exhaust the advancing Japanese columns. Many of the officers commanding this defense were students of Jiang Baili himself, including Chen Cheng, Bai Chongxi, Tang Shengzhi, and Xue Yue.

  The fragility of China's position was already visible before the main campaign began. Han Fuqu, the chairman of Shandong province, repeatedly disobeyed Chiang Kai-shek's orders to stand and fight, pulling his forces back to conserve them. After Qingdao fell to the Japanese in January 1938, Han's insubordination was formally condemned and he was executed on the 24th of January. The following March, Japanese forces occupied the Shandong capital Jinan, tearing apart the Yellow River defense line and pushing sixty-four Chinese divisions to gather around Xuzhou in Jiangsu.

• 3. Stalemates in the North and East

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  When Japanese armored units attacked in early February, striking Chinese positions about a hundred miles north and south of Xuzhou, the campaign that followed bore little resemblance to the swift encirclement Tokyo had planned. On the 9th of February, Japanese forces seized the city of Bengbu, securing control of territory north of the Huai River. But from that point, repeated Japanese attempts to advance were met with fierce and costly Chinese resistance.

  At the eastern bank of the Huai River, the 51st corps of the Northeastern Army and Zhang Zizhong's 59th corps of the Northwestern Army held against the Japanese 13th Division from the 5th to the 20th of February. The 7th and 31st corps of the Guangxi Army struck the Japanese flank at Dingyuan County, helping the Chinese shore up their line along the river.

  Further north, along the Jinpu line, the city of Teng xian, today's Tengzhou, became the site of a prolonged and ultimately fatal defense. The troops there were poorly armed soldiers from Sichuan, commanded by General Wang Mingzhang. Despite their disadvantages in equipment and experience, they held their positions until mid-March, when sustained artillery barrages and the sheer weight of the Japanese force finally overwhelmed them. General Wang was killed in the fighting.

  At the eastern end of the Longhai railway near the port of Lianyungang, Chinese forces at Yixian and Haiyuan matched the Japanese yard by yard in what the source describes as battles where both sides frequently fought to the death. At Linyi, Generals Pang Bingxun and Zhang Zizhong entrenched their forces and held for three weeks, stopping a Japanese advance that might otherwise have flanked the entire northern Chinese line. By late March, the Japanese had still not broken through, but they were converging on Xuzhou from multiple directions.

• 4. Victory at Taierzhuang

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  Taierzhuang sat along the Grand Canal at the intersection of the Jinpu and Longhai lines, and by late March 1938 both sides recognized that whoever held it controlled the corridor to Xuzhou. On the 1st of April, Chiang Kai-shek sent a telegram to his generals with direct orders: "the enemy at Taerzhuang must be destroyed."

  Three Japanese divisions under General Itagaki Seishiro moved south into the ancient stone-walled city. They were met by forces under Li Zongren, Sun Lianzhong, and Tang Enbo, who possessed artillery and the advantage of fighting on ground that diminished Japanese armor. In the narrow streets and rubble of the urban core, tanks could not maneuver freely and artillery bombardment risked hitting Japanese troops as easily as Chinese ones. The cramped conditions effectively leveled the playing field.

  What followed between the 22nd of March and the 7th of April has been compared, in the source's words, to "the costly urban battles that Europe was soon to see." The fighting was close quarters, often at nighttime, vicious even by the standards of a war already defined by atrocity. The Chinese managed to keep their own supply lines open while cutting off Japanese resupply, starving the Japanese units of ammunition, reinforcements, and provisions.

  By the 7th of April, the Japanese were in retreat. Both sides had lost some twenty thousand men each in less than two weeks. The city of Taierzhuang was nearly destroyed. Yet the battle's outcome was the first clear Chinese victory of the entire Second Sino-Japanese War, and it sent a charge through Chinese military and civilian morale that would shape how the country approached the defense of Wuhan in the months ahead.

• 5. Encirclement and Breakout

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  The Japanese responded to their defeat at Taierzhuang by assembling approximately four hundred thousand troops around Xuzhou. The North China Area Army contributed four divisions and two infantry brigades drawn from the Kwantung Army. The Central China Expeditionary Army added three more divisions along with the 1st and 2nd Tank Battalions and motorized support units. The 5th Tank Battalion backed the 3rd Infantry Division as it drove north along the railway toward Xuzhou.

  On the Chinese side, the defenders still numbered somewhere between four hundred fifty thousand and six hundred thousand troops, but their command structure was fractured. The Chinese military was divided along warlord lines, with mutual distrust complicating logistics and coordination at every level. Heavy fighting continued through April in the west, east, and north of the city. Tang Enbo's 20th Army Corps and four other corps fought the Japanese to a stalemate by late April. The Yunnan Army's 60th Corps held Yuwang Mountain for close to a month against repeated Japanese attacks; by the time it handed its position to the Guizhou 140th Division and withdrew on the 15th of May, it had lost more than half its troops.

  The Japanese pressed their advantage in the south, capturing Mengcheng on the 9th of May and Hefei on the 14th, then splitting into the Iwanaka and Imada detachments to cut off the Chinese escape route west of Xuzhou. A simultaneous amphibious landing at Lianyungang and Japanese seizure of the Longhai railway left the Chinese nearly surrounded. Chiang authorized withdrawal.

  On the 15th of May, Li Zongren, Bai Chongxi, and Tang Enbo began evacuating Xuzhou's military and civilian population. Li ordered his troops to dissolve into the countryside, move south and west only after dark, cross the Jinpu Railway, and reassemble in four groups in the Dabeishan Mountains. Moving at night and hiding in wheat fields by day, somewhere between two hundred thousand and three hundred thousand soldiers in forty divisions slipped through the Japanese net. A sandstorm and fog on the 18th of May further concealed the retreating columns. By the 21st of May the breakout was complete. The withdrawal has been described as one of the war's most skillful maneuvers. Those rescued units would later constitute roughly fifty percent of the Chinese forces that defended Wuhan.

• 6. The Yellow River Flood

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  By May 1938, Japanese columns advancing along the captured railway lines had closed to within forty kilometers of Zhengzhou. Wuhan, China's next great strategic objective, was suddenly within Japan's reach. Chiang's commanders faced the prospect of losing it before adequate defenses could be built.

  The decision they reached was catastrophic in its human cost. Chinese forces destroyed the dikes holding back the Yellow River in central Henan, releasing a flood that inundated approximately fifty-four thousand square kilometers of land. The floodwaters tore a new course through the river's bed and buried entire communities. Estimates of the dead range from four hundred thousand to five hundred thousand people. Refugees numbered somewhere between three million and five million.

  The flood did buy time. It halted the Japanese columns that had been racing toward Zhengzhou and forced a recalculation of the entire Japanese offensive timetable. The defense of Wuhan gained months of preparation. Whether that bought time justified the destruction of so much of central China and the deaths of so many civilians remains, as the source notes, a matter of controversy among historians.

  The city of Xuzhou itself stood as evidence of what total war looked like at close range. Canadian Jesuit missionaries who stayed in the city after the Japanese occupation reported that more than a third of Xuzhou's houses had been destroyed and most of the population had fled. On the 14th of May alone, a single Japanese bombing raid killed some seven hundred civilians. Throughout the surrounding countryside, foreign missionaries documented repeated massacres. The population that remained faced food shortages driven by the collapse of agricultural labor, and was preyed upon by bandits who moved into the vacuum left by the retreating armies.