Three Alls policy

• 1. Introduction

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  Kill all, burn all, loot all gave the Three Alls policy its name, a Japanese scorched-earth campaign against Chinese guerrillas in World War II. One Japanese colonel captured the mindset in his own diary, recording that his orders were that every person in this place must be killed. Chinese Communist records describe their North China base area population falling from 44 million to 25 million during the years the policy ran. This documentary traces how a single act of retaliation grew into a strategy of engineered starvation, chemical attack and mass killing. Some historians call it genocidal, and the same three-word formula would resurface far from China before the war's end.

• 2. Origins Of Annihilation

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  In the Pingdingshan massacre, Japanese soldiers machine-gunned roughly 3,000 civilians and razed the village, acting on suspicion that it had sheltered resistance fighters. That atrocity took place during Japan's occupation of Manchuria, years before the wider campaign later named the Three Alls policy took shape.

  The North China Area Army tested harsher methods starting in late 1938, launching what it called annihilation campaigns to crush guerrilla resistance in Hebei province. Emperor Hirohito personally approved these operations in an order dated the 2nd of December 1938. Major General Ryūkichi Tanaka expanded the approach into formal annihilation campaigns in 1940, ordering the destruction of villages and the massacre of their populations. Between September and December of 1940, Japanese units swept through Shanxi Province in mopping-up campaigns. They killed wounded guerrillas sheltering in towns, slaughtered livestock herds and burned grain stockpiles. In Qinyuan County, Japanese forces killed 5,000 villagers over a two-week operation in late October 1940. In the town of Hanhong, soldiers sealed 129 residents inside the village temple and burned them alive. In another nearby village, Japanese troops raped 97 people before killing them.

  By mid-1940, the Chinese Communists controlled vast tracts of countryside and tens of millions of people. The Imperial Japanese Army had mostly ignored them, treating the Kuomintang-aligned National Revolutionary Army as its main enemy instead. That changed in August 1940, when the Communist Eighth Route Army, built from the old Chinese Red Army, launched the Hundred Regiments Campaign. The offensive struck bridges, railroads, mines, blockade houses and telephone lines across northern China, and its scale stunned Japanese commanders. In response, General Tanaka drew up a plan for the total annihilation of the Communist base areas. In his words, the enemy could never use them again.

• 3. Engineering Empty Land

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  Command's own name for the campaign was Jinmetsu Soto Sakusen, and it took full effect in the spring of 1941. General Yasuji Okamura took command that summer and divided five provinces, Hebei, Shandong, Shaanxi, Shanxi and Chahar, into pacified, semi-pacified and unpacified zones. His plan concentrated the rural population into militarized encampments while turning open countryside into what planners called mujin chiku, or unpopulated zones. The historian Gavan McCormack argued these measures merit consideration as genocide. Journalist Iris Chang, author of The Rape of Nanking, called them a massive terrorist campaign.

  One Japanese colonel wrote in his diary, "around here, even these China women join the war." In one instance, on the 27th of April 1941, Japanese troops in Hebei gathered 16 civilians suspected of aiding the Eighth Route Army. They publicly tortured all 16 to death. On the 4th of May 1941, Japanese troops learned that the families of Communist guerrillas lived in Liangou Village. They massacred 80 women, children and elderly residents there in a reprisal raid. Okamura formally took command of the North China Area Army on the 7th of July 1941. Two days later, his predecessor, acting commander Lieutenant General Hayao Tada, issued the Jin-Cha-Ji Border Region Pacification Plan. Historian Eguchi Keiichi later described that plan as a Three Alls Operation.

  Okamura's strategy combined burning villages and confiscating grain with forcing peasants to build collective hamlets. It also relied on vast trench lines and thousands of miles of containment walls, moats, watchtowers and roads meant to box guerrillas in. Official orders called for the destruction of "enemies pretending to be local people." They also targeted "all males between the ages of fifteen and sixty whom we suspect to be enemies." Japanese soldiers routinely killed young men in their raids, conscripting survivors into forced labor units.

  From August 1941, the North China Army marked out no-man's-land zones along railway lines and around mountains, then emptied them through massacre or deportation. Around Mount Wutai, Japanese forces drowned 342 villagers in a local river. Near Mount Lushan in Pingshan, Hubei, Japanese units massacred 1,411 villagers. In just two districts, Pingxi and Beiyue, Japanese forces abducted 20,000 young men as slave labor. They also looted 80,000 head of livestock and chickens, and destroyed or plundered 30,000 tons of grain. On the 3rd of December 1941, Imperial General Headquarters Order Number 575 authorized a further escalation of the campaign. Japan's war was about to widen dramatically.

• 4. The Peak Year

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  After the attack on Pearl Harbor, Japan began redeploying troops and resources from the North China Army to the wider war. Even so, the North China Army only intensified its mopping-up operations against regional guerrillas, and 1942 marked the campaign's greatest intensity. Having suffered heavy losses, the Chinese Eighth Route Army retreated to southwestern Hebei Province. Pursuing the retreating guerrillas, Japanese forces killed thousands of civilians in multiple villages, in one instance dumping the corpses into local wells.

  Starting in May 1942, General Okamura deployed three divisions and two mixed brigades, roughly 50,000 men, in a mopping-up operation across central Hebei. These troops killed tens of thousands of civilians while deporting many more to Manchuria for slave labor. On the 14th of June 1942, Japanese troops massacred 167 civilians in Yebei Village, Hebei. They threw nine children and infants to their deaths from great heights.

  In July 1942, Japanese troops destroyed 128 river dikes, deliberately flooding every county in Hebei Province. The flooding struck 6,752 villages, destroyed 400 square miles of farmland, and displaced 2,000,000 civilians. Deported civilians were held in so-called protected areas, where they were enslaved to build forts and pillboxes. Japanese soldiers routinely mailed photographs of beheadings and bayonetings home to their families, and recorded their own atrocities in personal letters and diaries.

• 5. Bodies As Battlefield

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  Japanese scorched-earth operations continued through 1943 and 1944, with repeated raids designed to sabotage harvests and loot remaining supplies. Some of these raids featured public displays of torture. Villagers were forced to stand naked in snow until they died, or men were made to watch their female relatives raped and murdered. Near Heishuiping in November 1943, Japanese forces executed several hundred villagers by shooting, burying them alive, dismembering them, beheading them, and throwing some off cliffs. As the Pacific War drained Japanese resources, these campaigns gradually shrank in scale. Raids still continued until March 1945, by which point North and Central China remained unpacified.

  Young Chinese women were also forcibly conscripted, and many faced sexual violence from their Japanese captors. Fourteen-year-old Deng Yumin, from Baoding, was "chosen for special work" by a forty-year-old Japanese officer, who then "raped her every day." In southern Shanxi and northwest Hubei, Japanese forces raped and tortured local farmers and villagers, deporting survivors to Manchuria and leaving corpses unburied. On Hainan Island in December 1943, Japanese forces forced ten young women and teenagers to the edge of their village and gang-raped them. They stabbed a 14-year-old in the genitals until she died, and cut the breasts from a 15-year-old. They also cut open a pregnant woman and tore out the fetus.

• 6. Chemical Weapons And Starvation

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  The North China Area Army treated starvation itself as a weapon, looting rural grain stores and burning whatever harvests it could not confiscate. Troops slaughtered livestock, destroyed village wells, and demolished river dikes to flood farmland deliberately. Between 1937 and 1945, the seven Communist base regions affected by the policy lost 76,000,000 tons of grain and 55,000,000 head of livestock, pigs and sheep. Another 19,520,000 homes were burned down.

  Japanese forces also deployed chemical weapons against rural villages, repeatedly raiding the same areas to prevent any resistance from regrowing. In May 1942, some 500 men of the Japanese 110th Division swept the village of Beitong. Residents there had dug tunnels to hide from Japanese operations. Japanese troops filled those tunnels with chemical weapons, tear gas and smoke, gassing or asphyxiating hundreds of villagers to death. Those who escaped the tunnels were shot or stabbed, including children as young as ten, while Japanese troops raped fleeing women before killing them. The massacre killed more than 1,000 people in Beitong alone, and its houses were burned down after the food inside had been looted.

• 7. Counting The Dead

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  Historian Sarah Paine describes the Three Alls policy as a war of annihilation in its scope and devastation. Rummel states that it was the worst of all Japanese atrocities committed on the Chinese mainland. In a 1996 study, historian Mitsuyoshi Himeta estimated that the policy caused more than 2,700,000 Chinese civilian deaths, directly and indirectly. Himeta noted that Emperor Hirohito himself had sanctioned the policy. Max Hastings writes that several million Chinese civilians died from the policy. Historian Li Enhan estimates that Japanese forces massacred 3,180,000 civilians across Communist guerrilla base areas over the whole war, based on incomplete Communist records. Another 2,760,000 civilians, he adds, were forced into slavery.

  On the 30th of January 1946, Ye Jianying wrote to the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration describing the devastation Japanese forces left behind. Investigations by the Provisional Relief Committee covered six liberated zones, including Shanxi-Suiyuan and Shandong. They found that Japanese forces had massacred nearly 2 million civilians there and abducted as many as 700,000. Drawing on Himeta's research, historian Herbert Bix wrote that the Sankō Sakusen campaign surpassed the Rape of Nanking in both scale and brutality. In his words, these military operations caused death and suffering on a scale incomparably greater than the totally unplanned orgy of killing in Nanking. According to Jules Archer, the Japanese were estimated to have killed most of 19,000,000 missing people. Other scholars believe many simply fled to safer ground instead. Chinese tactics, including disguising fighters as civilians, complicated the count further, and Japan's use of chemical weapons violated international agreements it had refused to sign.

  The phrase Three Alls first appeared in the Chinese Communist Party's newspaper, Liberation Daily, in July 1941. It was popularized in Japan in 1957, when former soldiers released from the Fushun War Criminals Management Centre published a book. In it, they confessed to war crimes committed under General Okamura's leadership. Death threats from Japanese militarists and ultranationalists later forced the book's publishers to halt its printing. Japanese officers themselves claimed the campaign's real name was the Three Prohibitions Campaign. They insisted it was meant to stop local Chinese civilians from burning, stealing or killing. The campaign's memory reached popular culture too. The 2008 film The Children of Huang Shi covers the Japanese invasion of China from 1938 to 1945. Part of it is set during the sankō sakusen.

• 8. Three Alls In Vietnam

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  On the 9th of March 1945, Japan replaced the French colonial government in Vietnam. Japanese forces then began openly looting Vietnamese property, stealing watches, pencils, bicycles, money and clothing in Bac Giang and Bac Can. The Viet Minh rejected Japanese demands to stop fighting and support Japan. In response, Japanese forces implemented the Three Alls policy there, known as San Kuang, against the Vietnamese population. The Vietnamese called the Japanese dwarfed monsters, or Wa, after atrocities in Thai Nguyen province at Dinh Hoa, Vo Nhai and Hung Son.

  Truong Chinh, chairman of the North Vietnamese National Assembly, documented these atrocities in an article titled Policy of the Japanese Pirates Towards Our People. He first wrote it in August 1945, and it was reprinted in the Hanoi newspaper Nhan Dan on the 17th of August 1970. He described Japanese forces looting shrines, temples, eggs, vegetables, rice and livestock, stealing land, and destroying cotton and vegetable fields across Annam and Tonkin. He also denounced Japan's claim to have liberated Vietnam from France under the Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere announced by Tojo.

  Japanese forces also played local groups against each other, inciting Lao people to kill Vietnamese; Lao attackers murdered seven Vietnamese officials in Luang Prabang. In Hanoi, Japanese soldiers beheaded Vietnamese caught stealing bread or corn under wartime martial law. In Thai Nguyen province, Japanese troops threw a Vietnamese boat builder from Vo Nhai into a river. They stabbed his stomach on suspicion that he had helped Viet Minh guerrillas. In the same province, they slit open the Dai Tu mayor's abdomen and hung him upside down.

  Japan surrendered on the 15th of August 1945. Four days later, on the 19th of August, the Viet Minh rose up against the remaining Japanese forces. Between the 15th and the 20th of April 1945, the Tonkin Revolutionary Military Conference called for a general uprising. It organized seven war zones, each named after a historical Vietnamese hero. The Viet Minh's Liberation Army published a newspaper called Khang Nhat, meaning Resistance against Japan, as part of that campaign.

  Vietnamese women were also forced into sexual slavery as comfort women, alongside Burmese, Indonesian, Thai and Filipino women. Comfort stations operated across Southeast Asia as well as North and South Korea. One Korean comfort woman, Kim Ch'un-hui, remained in Vietnam afterward and died there in 1963 at age 44. By then she had built a dairy farm and a cafe, and had accumulated cash and diamonds worth 200,000 US dollars. According to Thomas U. Berger, 1,000,000 Vietnamese starved to death during the war. Vietnam suffered an estimated 2 billion US dollars in damage at 1945 values. The destruction included a third of its bridges and 90 percent of its heavy vehicles.

  In 2000, Vietnamese journalist Trần Khuê publicly accused historians at Ho Chi Minh City's Institute of Social Sciences of whitewashing Japan's atrocities. He said they had downplayed the famine's death toll from 2 million to 1 million. That same year, Vietnamese professor Văn Tạo and Japanese professor Furuta Moto completed a joint field study of the 1945 famine. Their research confirmed that Japan's wartime policies had killed 2 million Vietnamese through starvation.