Operation Ichi-Go

• 1. Introduction

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  Operation Ichi-Go was, by one historian's reckoning, the largest military operation ever carried out in the history of the Japanese army. Half a million troops, a hundred thousand horses, fifteen hundred artillery pieces, eight hundred tanks: Japan mobilized all of this and more for a campaign fought entirely on Chinese soil, from April to December 1944. The force was supplied with eight months of fuel and two full years of ammunition.

  Yet for all that scale, the story of Ichi-Go is also a story of collapse on the other side. An American general described one Chinese defending force as a "poorly disciplined mob." A journalist who witnessed the campaign wrote that within three weeks, a Chinese army of 300,000 men had ceased to exist. And when it was over, the operation's ripple effects would reach far beyond the battlefield, touching the inner politics of the Allied alliance, the American press, and the eventual outcome of the Chinese Civil War.

  What drove Japan to gamble so enormously on a land campaign? Why did Chinese defenses crumble so fast? And what did the aftermath of Ichi-Go ultimately mean for China's future?

• 2. Japan's Reasons

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  Emperor Hirohito approved the objectives of Ichi-Go on the 24th of January 1944. The formal goal was the neutralization of United States Air Force bases in China, particularly the XX Bomber Command installations near Chengdu, in Sichuan province. American bombers flying from those bases were striking Japanese shipping and the Japanese home islands directly, and Japan wanted them gone.

  But the China Expeditionary Army, under General Shunroku Hata, expanded those objectives. Beyond destroying the air bases, Hata's planners wanted to open an overland rail route running through French Indochina and across China, providing Japan with a land corridor for raw materials from south-east Asia. Allied victories in the Pacific were steadily tightening the ring around Japanese supply lines. If the sea lanes became impassable, an overland route could substitute. The operation also corresponded with an Imperial General Staff contingency plan intended to develop new offensives by 1946.

  General Yasuji Okamura was given command of the operation. Alongside the strategic rationale, some Japanese planners believed Ichi-Go might compel the Allies to open peace negotiations, giving Japan a stronger hand at any eventual bargaining table. By early February 1944, repairs to a major bridge along the Yangtze and maintenance of air fields signaled that preparations were already underway.

• 3. A Weakened Defender

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  China's economy had started collapsing in 1941, three full years before the Japanese offensive began. The country had entered the war in 1937 with a primarily agrarian economy, and lost much of its industrial capacity to Japanese occupation almost immediately. Blockades, shortages of staple goods, poor weather, and runaway inflation compounded the damage. Widespread famine struck from 1942 onward.

  To cope, the Chinese government encouraged the military to produce its own food. Some units went further, entering industry or engaging in smuggling. The self-sufficiency drive, combined with reduced Japanese activity after December 1941, eroded military readiness and fed corruption. By the time Ichi-Go opened, the effectiveness of the Chinese military had, in the words of one account, "plummeted".

  Diplomatic failures deepened the problem. At the Cairo Conference in November 1943, China agreed to join major combined operations in Burma, on the condition that Western Allies committed significant resources. That commitment did not materialize. Just days later, at the Tehran Conference, Britain, the United States, and the Soviet Union agreed to prioritize the European theater instead. In January 1944, Chiang Kai-shek warned President Franklin D. Roosevelt directly that putting Europe first would invite Japan to knock China out of the war. The warning went unheeded.

  In late March 1944, China concluded that a Japanese offensive was imminent. The American ambassador, Clarence E. Gauss, sent corroborating reports to Washington. China sought to bring in its best available troops, the American-trained and equipped Y Force based in Yunnan, but those soldiers had already been earmarked for the Burma campaign. In early April, the United States threatened to halt Lend-Lease to China if Y Force was withheld from Burma. Y Force ultimately joined the Burma campaign in mid-May, just as Ichi-Go was gathering momentum.

• 4. The Henan Collapse

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  The first phase, codenamed Kogo, opened on the 17th of April 1944 and targeted the Beijing-Hankou railway in Henan province. The 60,000-70,000 Japanese troops involved broke through Chinese defenses by the end of the 18th of April and took Xuchang a week later. On the 1st of May, the day Xuchang fell, divisional commander Lu Gongliang and deputy divisional commander Huang Yonghuai were both killed, along with two regimental commanders. Not a single officer from the divisional headquarters was found after defenders broke out of the city.

  Japanese encirclement of Luoyang followed on the 14th of May; the city fell on the 25th of May. The Chinese lost more than 19,000 troops killed, wounded, or missing from the three divisions defending it. Official Japanese military history put Chinese losses from the start of the operation through the fall of Luoyang at approximately 37,500 killed and approximately 15,000 captured; Japanese losses in the same period were recorded at approximately 850 killed and approximately 2,500 wounded.

  The reasons for the rout were multiple. The local population, alienated by wartime deprivation and by the First War Zone's aggressive requisitions, actively withheld support. Civilians were reported attacking Chinese troops, stealing abandoned weapons, and refusing orders to destroy highways. American reports described the resistance as "token." Theodore H. White, a Time magazine correspondent present during the campaign, observed Chinese officers neglecting their duties and calculated that within three weeks a Chinese army of 300,000 men had ceased to exist.

  Deputy commander Tang Enbo reported that the losses of just two of his army groups totaled 58,036 killed, wounded, or missing. Combined with losses elsewhere in Henan, the total casualties of the First War Zone reached as high as 100,000. A regiment of the Japanese 37th Division, meanwhile, advanced 500 kilometers in 20 days, averaging 27 kilometers per day.

• 5. Hunan and the Fall of Hengyang

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  The second phase, Togo 1, started on the 27th of May 1944 with 200,000 Japanese troops pushing south from Wuhan. The target was the Guangzhou-Hankou railway and the city of Changsha. General Xue Yue commanded the defending Ninth War Zone; his force had held Changsha against three separate Japanese campaigns from 1939 to 1942. Togo 1 was categorically different from those earlier attempts. It advanced in three columns across a 150-kilometer-wide front rather than one, and was adequately supplied throughout.

  Changsha was defended by three understrength Chinese divisions under General Zhang Deneng, totaling about 10,000 troops against 30,000 Japanese attackers. One of the two Japanese divisions attacking had been specifically trained in urban warfare. Japanese bombers struck the Chinese artillery on Yuelu Mountain south of the city. Troop redeployments disorganized the defense, leaving many Chinese units stranded and confused about whether to retreat. The Japanese took Changsha on the 18th of June after three days of fighting.

  The city of Hengyang, south of Changsha, proved a different ordeal. General Fang Xianjue commanded 18,000 defenders behind concrete fortifications stocked with artillery, anti-tank guns, and supplies. On the 25th of June, the Japanese captured a major nearby American air base. Two Japanese divisions attacked Hengyang from the west and south. Flooded paddy fields and canals made tank use difficult to the west; hills blocked the south. Both attacks stalled with heavy casualties.

  The Japanese paused twice to bring up reinforcements. Chiang Kai-shek did not resupply the city. General Joseph Stilwell, who controlled Lend-Lease allocation in the Chinese theater, refused General Chennault's request to divert 1,000 tons of supplies to Hengyang. The official United States Army history records that Stilwell believed Chinese politics would prevent those supplies from being used against the Japanese. Five Japanese divisions resumed the attack on the 3rd of August, breached the northern wall on the 7th of August, and captured the city by the morning of the 8th of August.

• 6. Stilwell, Chiang, and the Alliance

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  Operation Ichi-Go cracked the Chinese-American alliance wide open. General Stilwell saw the Nationalist military's failures as his opportunity to win a long-running political struggle: he wanted full command over all Chinese armed forces. He persuaded General George Marshall to have President Roosevelt send Chiang Kai-shek an ultimatum, demanding that Chiang place Stilwell in "unrestricted command of all your forces" at once, with a threat to end all American aid if he refused.

  Roosevelt's special envoy Patrick Hurley urged Stilwell to delay delivering the message and instead negotiate a deal Chiang might accept. Stilwell delivered it anyway. Chiang, who regarded the ultimatum as a move toward the complete subjugation of China, gave a formal reply demanding Stilwell's immediate replacement and offering to welcome any other qualified American general.

  Chiang's position was that Stilwell had shifted too many Chinese forces into the Burma campaign, leaving China exposed. Stilwell was removed as Chief of Staff to Chiang and as commander of the US Forces, China Theater. Major General Albert Wedemeyer replaced him. Stilwell's other command responsibilities across the China Burma India Theater were divided among other officers.

  Just before Stilwell left, New York Times correspondent Brooks Atkinson interviewed him in Chongqing. Atkinson's dispatch described Chiang's regime as "moribund" and "anti-democratic" and characterized the decision to relieve Stilwell as a political triumph for a government more focused on its own supremacy than on fighting Japan. Atkinson had visited Mao Zedong at the communist capital of Yenan and came away viewing the Communist forces as a democratic movement. The view was shared by many American journalists in China, but pro-Chiang Allied censorship had suppressed it until the Stilwell recall forced the coverage into the open.

• 7. Consequences and Legacy

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  Japan gained the air bases and the outline of a rail corridor it sought, but Ichi-Go's strategic return was limited. American bombers from the Chengdu bases were relocated to the Mariana Islands, where planes from Saipan and Tinian could still reach the Japanese home islands. In the territories Japan seized, its forces controlled the cities but not the surrounding countryside. Overextended supply lines thinned Japanese defenses across the expanded occupation zone. The bulk of Chinese forces retreated rather than being destroyed and later returned to strike Japanese positions. Subsequent Japanese attempts to push into Sichuan, including in the Battle of West Hunan, ended in failure. Japanese killed in action reached 11,742 by mid-November 1944, and the number who died of illness was more than twice that figure. Total Japanese deaths reached approximately 100,000 by the end of 1944.

  According to historian Cox, China suffered approximately 750,000 casualties in total, including soldiers who simply dissolved away into the population. The campaign further gutted Nationalist finances. Unable to pay its bills, the Nationalist government increasingly overlooked military corruption and smuggling, and the army turned to press-ganging peasants from villages to fill its depleted ranks.

  Chinese Communist guerrillas were positioned to exploit the chaos in areas Ichi-Go swept through. The operation accelerated a shift in rural loyalties that would prove decisive. Historian Hans van de Ven argues that Ichi-Go's political impact on China was as consequential for the post-war world order as Operation Overlord and Operation Bagration were for Europe.

  In the spring of 1945, the United States agreed to train and equip 36 Chinese divisions. China was already planning a counter-offensive for the autumn of 1945, designated "White Tower" and "Iceman," aimed at recapturing coastal ports in south-west China to reopen Allied supply routes. The war in the Pacific ended before those plans were tested, but Theodore White's 1958 novel The Mountain Road, drawn from an interview with former OSS Major Frank Gleason, kept the memory of the campaign alive. Gleason's demolition group destroyed more than 150 bridges and 50,000 tons of munitions during the retreat to slow the Japanese advance, a detail that shaped White's account of the human cost of the war in China.