Bombing of Chongqing

• 1. Introduction

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  The Bombing of Chongqing began on the 18th of February 1938 and did not end until the 19th of December 1944. For nearly seven years, the wartime capital of China endured 268 air raids. Some brought a few dozen aircraft. Others brought over 150 bombers at a time. The campaign was authorized by Japan's Imperial General Headquarters and carried out jointly by the Imperial Japanese Army and Navy air services. What drove it, who fought back, and at what cost are the questions this documentary will answer.

• 2. The Defenders

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  China's air force at the start of the war was not built from a single tradition. It absorbed aircraft and crews from former warlord factions, Chinese-American volunteers, and foreign instructors from Italy and Japan itself. At the outbreak of fighting in 1937, the fleet leaned heavily on US-made aircraft. By early 1938, pilots had almost completely transitioned into Soviet-made Polikarpov I-15 and I-16 fighters, kept flying on 65-75 octane fuel at a time when Japanese aircraft were burning 90-plus octane.

  The fuel gap was not a small thing. Higher octane meant faster aircraft, better altitude, greater engine power. Chinese fighters struggled to gain enough speed and height to make even a single head-on pass at the incoming formations. The British Royal Air Force made a comparable leap, moving from 87-octane to 100-octane during the Battle of Britain, and the results were transformative. China had no such option in those first years.

  By the end of 1938, severe losses at Shanghai, Nanjing, Taiyuan, and Wuhan had hollowed out the Chinese Air Force. A handful of Dewoitine D.510 fighters, left behind by the defunct French Volunteer Group after it was disbanded in October 1938, supplemented what remained. Around Chongqing, 18 primary anti-aircraft artillery batteries were positioned by 1939. A network of manually operated searchlights coordinated with lone fighter pilots who flew nighttime intercept missions, a tactic that had first been used two years earlier over Nanjing.

  Chongqing's mountainous terrain helped in one other way. The hills allowed for the construction of deep air-raid shelters, where critical infrastructure including factories, government offices, and the city's radio station was moved underground.

• 3. Operation 100

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  On the 3rd of May 1939, the bombing changed scale. Japan's new airbases in Hubei province, including Wuhan, gave its air forces the range and logistics to mount coordinated mass attacks. The campaign called Operation 100 opened with 54 bombers hitting Chongqing on its first day. The following day brought 27 more. On day one alone, roughly 98 high-explosive bombs and 68 incendiaries fell on the city. Major Deng Mingde led the 22nd Pursuit Squadron against that first wave and shot down seven bombers, but lost two pilots. One of them, veteran Zhang Mingsheng, bailed out burning and landed among civilians who mistook him for a Japanese airman. He was beaten on the ground, barely able to identify himself. He was rescued four hours later and died the next day in hospital.

  The night raid on the 4th of May was worse. Although the attacking force was smaller and dropped fewer bombs than the day before, the Chinese air bases around Chongqing were not yet set up for nighttime operations. There was no interception. Over three thousand people died, nearly two thousand more were wounded, and about two hundred thousand were left without homes.

  Two months after those first raids, tens of thousands of deaths into the campaign, the United States embargoed the export of airplane parts to Japan. It was the first economic sanction the US had imposed against Japan.

• 4. New Weapons, Desperate Tactics

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  By mid-1940, Japan had introduced updated G3M Model 22 and 23 bombers fitted with supercharged Kinsei 51 engines, each boosting the aircraft by 500 horsepower. The schnellbomber approach, flying fast and high, pushed the raids further beyond the reach of Chinese defenders. Japan also developed a reconnaissance-and-redirect strategy: fast C5M scout planes flew at high altitude, watching the Chinese fighters scramble. Once the defenders ran low on fuel and returned to base, the scouts radioed the bombers to hit the grounded aircraft while they refueled.

  Chinese pilots cracked the communications code the C5M crews were using and found partial countermeasures, including launching fast I-16s to chase the scouts away. On the 20th of May 1940, the 24th Pursuit Squadron shot down a C5M and three G3Ms over eastern Chongqing using just ten I-16 Type 17 fighters, the ones armed with 20mm ShVAK cannon and more powerful M-25V engines. Two of those aircraft were put out of action in the same fight, struck by return fire from the bomber formations.

  On the 11th of August 1940, 4th Pursuit Group commander Major Zheng Shaoyu tested a different weapon: air-burst bombs developed by combat flight instructor Yan Lei of the Central Air Force Academy. Major Zheng personally chose five pilots, including ace Liu Zhesheng and future ace Lt. Gao Youxin. At 13:56 that afternoon, 90 G3M bombers appeared in two waves. Zheng's team maneuvered above the formation and released the air-burst devices under parachutes. The blasts broke apart the lead formation, five bombers were claimed shot down, two wrecks confirmed on the ground at Shichuxian and Shuangqing. Eight Chinese fighters were damaged, and three of a Japanese bomber's seven-man crew were found alive and taken prisoner.

• 5. The Zero's Debut

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  The Mitsubishi A6M Zero received its first combat experience over Chongqing. On the 13th of September 1940-13 Zeroes of the 12th Kokutai, led by Lieutenant Saburo Shindo, escorted 27 G3M bombers into the city. They were met by 34 Chinese fighters: I-15bis led by Major Louie Yim-qun of the 28th Pursuit Squadron, I-16s led by Captain Yang Mengjing of the 24th, and additional Polikarpovs from Major Zheng Shaoyu's group. The battle lasted about half an hour before the Chinese ran low on fuel. Ten pilots were killed and eight wounded. The Zero pilots claimed all 27 Chinese aircraft shot down; in reality, all 13 Zeroes returned to base at Wuhan with only minor damage.

  The Chinese high command issued an order to avoid engaging the Zero. Pilots largely ignored it. On the 14th of March 1941, another large dogfight broke out over Chengdu. Eight Chinese pilots died that day, including top ace Major John Huang Xinrui and Captain Cen Zeliu. Among the dead was 2nd Lieutenant Lin Heng, younger brother of renowned architect Phyllis Lin Huiyin.

  On the 11th of August 1941, in what would be the last recorded dogfight between Chinese fighters and IJNAF Zeroes before Japan pulled its Zero squadrons out for preparations for Pearl Harbor, future Japanese ace Saburo Sakai described the final Chinese fighter in the air near Wenjiang Airbase as one that "snap-rolled, spiralled, looped and turned through seemingly impossible maneuvers... like a wraith." Sakai could only bring it down when the pilot was forced into a slow roll over a hill west of Chengdu. The belly of the biplane exposed into his gunsight. Four Chinese pilots died in that engagement. One of them, Lieutenant Huang Rongfa, had a fiancee named Yang Quanfang. On the 16th of August, she took a pistol and shot herself at the memorial for him and the other fallen pilots. Under those circumstances, the remains of Ms. Yang and Lieutenant Huang were buried together at the Chongqing Nanshan Air Force Martyrs Memorial Park.

• 6. The Tunnel Disaster

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  On the 5th of June 1941, in the midst of Operation 102, Japanese aircraft flew more than 20 sorties, bombing Chongqing for three consecutive hours. About four thousand residents who had taken shelter inside a tunnel were asphyxiated. The city's mountainous terrain had made tunnel shelters a lifeline through the campaign. That day, it became a mass grave.

  Earlier that spring, according to photographer Carl Mydans, the 1941 bombings were, at the time, what he called the most destructive shelling ever made on a city. The comparison against other campaigns was, he noted, rendered quickly obsolete. By the Battle of Berlin, Allied bombers would drop 2,300 tons of bombs on that city in a single night. The total dropped on Chongqing from 1939 to 1942 was three thousand tons.

  On the 30th of August 1941, Lt. General Saburo Endo, commander of the Imperial Japanese Army's 3rd Sentai, personally led a massive strike of 205 bomber-attack planes from Wuhan. Having received intelligence about a military conference at Yunxiu Villa, Endo led the assassination strike himself, targeting the Yunxiu Tower where Generalissimo Chiang Kai-shek was believed to be. Anti-aircraft fire was so intense that Endo later wrote it knocked him up from his seat several times. His formation was forced to increase altitude to 5,500 meters, the bombs missed their target, and two guards west of the tower were killed. Chiang Kai-shek survived. In his diary, he recorded the immense shocks of the bombing and the suffering of those who had endured it not just for days, but for over four years.

• 7. Justice Sought

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  In March 2006-40 Chinese survivors and relatives of victims sued the Japanese government in Japanese courts, seeking 10,000,000 yen each and a formal apology. One plaintiff explained the purpose plainly: by filing the lawsuit, they wanted the Japanese people to know about the Chongqing bombings. Later that year, the number of plaintiffs grew to 188. In 2015, the Tokyo High Court upheld a lower court ruling that acknowledged damages had been caused, but denied the plaintiffs any right to compensation.

  The monks of the Ciyun Temple had spent the years of the bombing rescuing and caring for the city's residents through the half-decade of raids. Their contribution stands as one of the lesser-told threads of the campaign. The bombing itself, authorized from the top of Japan's Imperial General Headquarters and driven in part by an invasion of Sichuan that ultimately never occurred, did not break China's government. The provisional wartime capital held. The last recorded raid fell on the 19th of December 1944.