Hundred Regiments Offensive

• 1. Introduction

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  The Hundred Regiments Offensive began at midnight on the 20th of August 1940, when gunfire and explosions erupted simultaneously along thousands of kilometers of the North China front. Signal flares lit the sky as the Eighth Route Army, led by the Chinese Communist Party, struck Japanese railways, fortifications, and bridges all at once. The scale of what unfolded over the following months would become the most extensive offensive the Eighth Route Army had mounted in Japanese-occupied territory since the war began. It would run until the 24th of January 1941, involve 105 regiments, and draw in an estimated 200,000 troops.

  How did a force that had spent years fighting as scattered guerrilla units manage to coordinate a campaign this vast? Why did it happen in the summer of 1940, at precisely this moment? And what did it cost the commanders who ordered it to launch it at all?

• 2. The Cage Closes

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  From 1939 to 1940, the Japanese army conducted 109 large-scale mopping-up operations in North China, each involving more than 1,000 troops, with total deployments exceeding 500,000 soldiers. The strategy behind these operations had a name: the "prison cage policy." Japanese forces built an interlocking network of railways, roadways, and fortified positions designed to isolate the Communist anti-Japanese base areas and strangle them into collapse.

  The psychological toll on China's home front was severe. Successive defeats on the main battlefields had given rise to a pervasive sense of hopelessness. Within the Kuomintang, calls for a negotiated peace with Japan grew louder. The Wang Jingwei faction had publicly broken away and formed a puppet government. Against this backdrop, the Eighth Route Army Headquarters concluded that a major offensive behind enemy lines was necessary not just as a military strike, but as a signal to a demoralized nation.

  The specific target the headquarters chose was the Shijiazhuang-Taiyuan railway, known as the Zheng-Tai Line. Seizing it, or at least crippling it, would directly undercut the infrastructure of the cage policy itself, since railways were the sinews that held the Japanese stranglehold together.

• 3. The Plan Takes Shape

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  On the 22nd of July 1940, three men put their names to the Preliminary Battle Order: Zhu De, Commander-in-Chief of the Eighth Route Army; Peng Dehuai, his deputy; and Zuo Quan, Deputy Chief of Staff. The directive was direct about what the campaign was for. It aimed "to counter the enemy's 'prison cage policy,' impede its progression towards Xi'an, secure advantageous conditions in the North China theater, and impact the national resistance initiative."

  The plan called for at least 22 regiments, drawn from the Jin-Cha-Ji Military Region, the 129th Division, and the 120th Division. Each formation was assigned a specific segment of the railway network. A second order, issued on the 8th of August, spelled out the assignments precisely: the Jin-Cha-Ji region would hit the eastern segment from Niangzi Pass to Shijiazhuang; the 129th Division would take the western segment from Niangzi Pass to Yuci; and the 120th Division would strike the northern segment of the Tongpu Railway and the Fen-Li Highway.

  The preparations were conducted under strict secrecy. Reconnaissance teams, disguised as ordinary travelers and shielded by local villagers, moved deep into the railway zones to map Japanese strongholds and terrain. Blacksmiths across the region were organized specifically to fabricate crowbars, pickaxes, and tools for pulling up rail lines. Soldiers drilled in demolition techniques, including a method for heating and bending steel rails to make them unusable. In Central Shanxi alone, over 10,000 militia members were mobilized for transport, medical support, and coordination. The order from headquarters was explicit: before the battle started, only brigade-level commanders were to know the campaign's objective.

• 4. The First Strike

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  The Jin-Cha-Ji forces moved on three axes. The right contingent seized Niangzi Pass and blew a railway bridge. The central contingent struck the Jingxing coal mine, working alongside the miners to dismantle the entire mining infrastructure; operations there halted for more than six months. The left contingent cut the line between Weishui and Shijiazhuang.

  At Jingxing, soldiers facing electrified fences used doors and blankets to short-circuit them, knowingly sacrificing themselves to open a path for the units behind them. Along the western segment, the 14th Regiment of the 129th Division seized the elevated position at Shinaoshan and held it against repeated Japanese counterattacks from Yangquan. For six days, those troops subsisted on black beans, corn husks, and vegetable soup, repelling the attacks and killing more than 400 enemy soldiers.

  On the 21st of August, the 8th Company of the 25th Regiment, 1st Death-Defying Column, was ambushed at Daluopo Village. The soldiers fought their way through hand-to-hand combat, killing more than 40 Japanese soldiers, including a platoon leader. The engagement directly contradicted a persistent belief that the Eighth Route Army could not hold its own against Japanese troops in close-quarters bayonet fighting. The company was subsequently awarded the honorary title of "Bayonet Combat Hero Company" by Eighth Route Army headquarters.

  What had begun as a plan for 22 regiments expanded rapidly as units up and down the front requested permission to join. By the 26th of August, Peng Dehuai and Zuo Quan formally named the operation the "Hundred Regiments Offensive." Within 20 days, the Eighth Route Army had dismantled the entire Zheng-Tai Railway, leaving, by their own account, no rail, sleeper, station, bunker, or bridge intact.

• 5. Strongholds and Setbacks

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  On the 22nd of September, the second phase opened with orders to attack Japanese strongholds along the major transportation corridors and inside the anti-Japanese base areas. In the Jin-Cha-Ji region, the focus shifted to the Laiyuan-Lingqiu area. At Dongtuanbao, the Eighth Route Army destroyed the Japanese Non-Commissioned Officers' Training Battalion and captured a position considered strategically critical.

  The 129th Division simultaneously launched the Yushe-Liaoxian Campaign. Soldiers advancing under artillery fire had to dig communication trenches toward Japanese bunkers, sometimes closing to within a few dozen meters before they could assault. Significant numbers of demolition troops were killed in these assaults. By this point, Japanese forces had adapted. They were leaning heavily on fortified defensive positions, and they had begun using chemical warfare against the attacking units.

  The third phase opened in early October, when the Japanese army mobilized tens of thousands of troops and launched retaliatory sweep operations across the base areas. These sweeps were carried out under what the source describes as the "Three Alls Policy" - burn all, kill all, loot all. The Eighth Route Army responded with mobile guerrilla tactics rather than fixed defense, seeking to wear down the Japanese forces through attrition.

  The battle of Guanjianao on the 29th of October brought Peng Dehuai himself to within 500 meters of the enemy line. He directed the siege of a roughly 500-strong Japanese force known as the Okazaki Detachment, drawn from the 4th Independent Mixed Brigade. After two days and nights of intense fighting, Chinese forces had to pull back when Japanese reinforcements arrived. The detachment's commander, Lieutenant Colonel Kenju Okazaki, was killed before relief came on the 1st of November. The 25th and 38th Regiments, the main attacking units at Guanjianao, suffered 500 killed and 1,570 wounded. Peng Dehuai himself reportedly regarded Guanjianao as one of the four major defeats of his military career.

• 6. What the Numbers Say

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  Casualty figures from the Hundred Regiments Offensive vary sharply depending on the source, and the discrepancies are striking. The Eighth Route Army left two separate reports, both based on data gathered before the 5th of December. The first report claimed the killing or wounding of 12,645 Japanese and 5,153 puppet troops; the second put those figures at 20,645 Japanese and 5,155 puppet troops. The two reports used the same base statistics, split into separate documents for reasons that remain unclear. A Chinese study published in 2010 by Pan Zeqin argued the true tally of combat successes exceeded 50,000.

  Japanese military records give a far more conservative picture. The 4th Independent Mixed Brigade recorded 276 killed in action; the 2nd Independent Mixed Brigade recorded 133 killed and 31 missing. A western source tallied approximately 20,900 Japanese casualties and around 20,000 among collaborating troops.

  The figures on physical infrastructure are equally contested. Chinese records state that 474 kilometers of railway and 1,502 kilometers of road were sabotaged, along with 213 bridges and 11 tunnels destroyed and 37 stations wrecked. Japanese records acknowledge 73 bridges, 3 tunnels, and 5 water towers blown up; 20 stations burned; and 117 separate incidents of railway sabotage totaling 44 kilometers of damage. Communication infrastructure losses in the Chinese account included 1,333 cable posts cut down and another 1,107 toppled, with up to 146 kilometers of cable severed. Even Japanese military records acknowledged that losses were substantial and that recovery would require considerable time and financial resources.

• 7. A Campaign That Divided Leaders

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  The disagreement between Peng Dehuai and Mao Zedong over how aggressively to confront Japanese forces had roots stretching back to the Luochuan Conference in August 1937. Mao's position had consistently been that the Communist forces could not afford the casualties that direct confrontation with the better-equipped Japanese army would bring. Peng's decision to launch the Hundred Regiments Offensive, and its scale when it unfolded, cut directly across that concern.

  Decades later, during the Cultural Revolution, the battle became evidence in a political prosecution. In 1967, a Red Guard group from Tsinghua University, backed by the Central Cultural Revolution Committee, circulated a leaflet claiming that Peng had launched the offensive to protect Chongqing and Xi'an, and had done so without authorization, quoting what they attributed to Mao: "How can Peng Dehuai make such a big move without consulting me? Our forces are completely revealed. The result will be terrible."

  The authorization question was contested. Nie Rongzhen, one of the campaign's participants, argued that the Eighth Route Army headquarters had sent a report to the top describing the planned strike on the Zheng-Tai Railway, and that disrupting a railway line was routine guerrilla work that would not typically require explicit central approval. Zhang Xueqin, a reporter for Phoenix News, pointed out that the order of military preparation specified a launch date of the 10th of August, ten days before the actual start, implying the Central Military Committee had known about the operation. The general consensus in China after the Cultural Revolution came down on the side of the battle's legitimacy. The Hundred Regiments Offensive Memorial Hall, completed in 2010 in Yangquan, Shanxi Province, holds the original directives signed by Zhu De, Peng Dehuai, and Zuo Quan.