Defense of the Great Wall

• 1. Introduction

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  The Defense of the Great Wall began on the night of the 1st of January 1933, when a Japanese garrison commander at Shanhaiguan detonated a few hand grenades and fired a handful of shots into the dark. It was a staged incident, a manufactured pretext, but it would set in motion five months of fighting across the northern frontier of China. The campaign ran from the 1st of January to the 31st of May, 1933, drawing in warlord armies, Nationalist divisions, Japanese cavalry, armored trains, bombers, and a fleet of warships. At stake was not just a strip of territory, but the question of where Japanese expansion in China would stop. Emperor Hirohito had told his generals explicitly that the army was not to go beyond the Great Wall. What happened next tests the limits of that instruction.

• 2. The Manufactured Crisis

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  Shanhaiguan sits at the eastern end of the Great Wall, precisely where the ancient fortification meets the ocean. Under the terms of the 1901 Boxer Rebellion accord, Japan was permitted to station a small garrison there, numbering around 200 men. The garrison commander's decision to stage an incident gave the Kwantung Army its opening. The demand that followed was straightforward: the Chinese 626th Regiment of the Northeastern Army, which was guarding the pass, must evacuate.

  The 626th refused. The Japanese 8th Division issued an ultimatum, then attacked. The assault came with four armored trains, ten tanks, close air support from bombers, and shelling from a dozen warships of the Imperial Japanese Navy's 2nd Fleet positioned offshore. Chinese regimental commander Shi Shian held as long as he could. By the 3rd of January, he had lost half his force and was forced to abandon his positions. The pass fell in three days.

• 3. The Fall of Rehe

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  Rehe province lay on the northern side of the Great Wall, and the Japanese Army declared it historically part of Manchuria. Before resorting to military force, the army tried to secure the province without a fight, hoping that General Tang Yulin could be persuaded to defect to the Manchukuo cause. When that diplomatic gambit failed, the army's Chief of Staff sought Emperor Hirohito's approval for what was called a strategic operation against Chinese forces in Rehe. Hirohito agreed, hoping it would close the Manchurian matter, but he stated explicitly that the army must not cross beyond the Great Wall.

  The offensive launched on the 23rd of February, 1933. Two days later, Chaoyang and Kailu were taken. On the 2nd of March, the Japanese 4th Cavalry Brigade met resistance from the forces of Sun Dianying near Chifeng, and took the city after days of fighting. On the 4th of March, Japanese cavalry and the 1st Special Tank Company rode into Chengde, the capital of Rehe. The province had fallen in under two weeks. Rehe was absorbed into Manchukuo, pushing that state's southern frontier all the way to the Great Wall itself.

• 4. The Wall as Battlefield

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  Chinese armies fell back from Rehe toward the passes cut through the Great Wall. Wan Fulin's 32nd Army retreated to Lengkou Pass. General Song Zheyuan's 29th Army pulled back, and Zhang Zuoxiang's 37th Division fell to Xifengkou Pass. General Guan Linzheng's 25th Division took position at Gubeikou Pass. The Great Wall, built centuries earlier to keep invaders out of China proper, was now the last defensive line.

  On the 9th of March, Chiang Kai-shek met with Zhang Xueliang in Baoding to discuss how to resist the advance. Chiang began shifting forces away from his campaign against the Jiangxi Soviet, drawing on the divisions of Huang Jie, Xu Tingyao, and Guan Linzheng. He also summoned Fu Zuoyi's 7th Army from Suiyuan. On the 12th of March, Zhang Xueliang resigned his command to He Yingqin, who took over responsibility for holding the wall.

  The disparity in weapons was stark. Many Chinese units were equipped primarily with handguns, hand grenades, and traditional swords, with only limited supplies of trench mortars, heavy machine guns, light machine guns, and rifles. Against Japanese firepower and air support, sword-armed soldiers of the Northwestern Army launched over twenty close assaults to repel Japanese troops from the ramparts. Several NRA divisions won significant engagements at Xifengkou and Gubeikou, using the wall's own structure to move soldiers between sectors, a tactic the Ming dynasty soldiers had used centuries before them.

  But the defense could not hold everywhere. On the 21st of March, Yiyuankou Pass fell to the Japanese. On the 8th of April, the KMT 29th Army evacuated Xifengkou. On the 11th of April, Lengkou Pass was retaken by Japanese forces after dozens of seesaw fights, and Chinese troops abandoned Jielingkou the same day. By the 20th of May, the Chinese army had retreated from its remaining positions along the wall entirely. Individual units showed what was possible: the He Zhuguo platoon held off the better-equipped Japanese for up to three days before being overrun. But reinforcements arrived too late and in insufficient numbers.

• 5. The Tanggu Truce

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  On the 22nd of May, 1933, two days after the last Chinese positions on the wall were abandoned, Chinese and Japanese representatives met at Tanggu in Tianjin. The agreement that emerged created a demilitarized zone extending one hundred kilometers south of the Great Wall. Chinese forces were prohibited from entering it. Japan retained the right to use reconnaissance aircraft and ground units to verify Chinese compliance.

  The truce also required the Chinese government to acknowledge the de facto independence of Manchukuo and accept the permanent loss of Rehe. The territorial buffer established by the agreement significantly reduced the defensive depth protecting China proper, leaving the heartland more exposed than it had been before the campaign began. The Tanggu Truce held for several years, but the forces it set in place would feed directly into the full-scale war that began in 1937.