Zhejiang-Jiangxi campaign

• 1. Introduction

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  The Zhejiang-Jiangxi campaign of 1942 began not with a military objective but with an act of revenge. On the 18th of April 1942, sixteen American B-25 bombers struck Tokyo, Nagoya, and Yokohama. Most of those planes, running out of fuel, crashed in the Chinese provinces of Zhejiang and Jiangxi. Sixty-four American airmen parachuted into the area, and Chinese civilians sheltered nearly all of them. The Imperial Japanese Army called the follow-up operation sei-go. What unfolded over the next four months was not a conventional military campaign. It was a systematic destruction of entire communities, carried out by 40 infantry battalions and 15-16 artillery battalions, from mid-May to early September 1942. Up to 250,000 Chinese civilians died. Who gave the orders, what methods were used, and how Japan's own soldiers became casualties of their own weapons are the questions this documentary sets out to answer.

• 2. The Raid That Started It

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  Imperial General Headquarters in Tokyo had already worried about air attacks from Chinese territory before a single American plane flew over Japan. Two days before the Doolittle Raid, Headquarters drafted an operational plan to defeat Chinese forces and destroy airfields in Zhejiang and Jiangxi. The raid itself only accelerated that plan. Because the Doolittle bombers had to launch earlier than expected, they ran short of fuel after striking Japan. All but one aircraft crashed or ditched in the Chinese provinces; that single exception flew against orders to the Soviet Union. Eight of the sixty-four airmen were captured by Japanese troops. Three of them were shot after what was described as a show trial for crimes against humanity. The rest had been hidden by local residents, a fact that Japanese planners used to justify what came next.

• 3. Forty Battalions Move West

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  On the 15th of May 1942, the main Japanese force pushed westward along the Zhejiang-Jiangxi Railway from towns including Fenghua, Shangyu, Shaoxing, and Xiaoshan. Commander Korechika Anami of the 11th Army directed two divisions and four detachments in a parallel advance from Hangzhou and Nanchang toward Shangrao in Jiangxi. The dual-axis advance was designed to trap Chinese forces between them. Chinese troops under Gu Zhutong, commander of the 3rd War Area, resisted but could not hold the territory. On August 15, Japanese forces were ordered to withdraw, and Chinese armies followed in pursuit. By the end of September, the Chinese had recovered nearly all ground along the Zhejiang-Jiangxi Railway, except for Jinhua, Wuyi, and the northeastern region. The military outcome, measured in territory held, was essentially a draw. The human outcome was not.

• 4. Reprisals Against Civilians

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  Japanese troops conducted sweeping searches for American airmen, and any town or village suspected of sheltering them was burned to the ground. The campaign's stated aim was to slaughter every man and child in affected areas. At least 10,000 civilians died specifically for having helped or sheltered Doolittle's men. The scale extended far beyond that. Thousands of farm animals were killed alongside the civilian population. In Yihuang County, Japanese soldiers killed all orphans and elderly people sheltered at a missionary station. Survivors described victims being bayoneted or tied to stakes and set alight like human candles. In other instances, children were thrown into wells and drowned. The majority of the up to 250,000 deaths across the four-month campaign were civilian.

• 5. Biological Warfare

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  Unit 731, the Imperial Japanese Army's biological warfare division, brought nearly 300 pounds of paratyphoid and anthrax pathogens into the campaign zone. Contaminated food and poisoned wells were left behind as Japanese forces withdrew from areas around Yushan, Kinhwa, and Futsin. The attack at Jinhua in Zhejiang did not unfold as planned. Japanese soldiers advanced back through the same territory they had just contaminated, and the diseases spread to their own ranks. Cholera, dysentery, and bubonic plague killed more than 1,700 Japanese soldiers and sickened at least 10,000 more by the army's own internal count. Those figures came from a Japanese prisoner of war captured by Americans in 1944, who had seen documents at the Water Supply and Purification Department headquarters in Nanking. He stated that the actual death toll was considerably higher, calling it a common practice to pare down unpleasant figures. The biological weapons deployed at Jinhua had turned against the army that deployed them.

• 6. Command and Accountability

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  General Shunroku Hata commanded the China Expeditionary Army and bore overall responsibility for the campaign. The operational logic ran from the Imperial General Headquarters directive, issued before the Doolittle Raid even landed, through Hata's command down to Anami's 11th Army. The goal of occupying Zhejiang and Jiangxi airfields was strategic: Japan wanted to ensure no American bombers could again reach the Japanese mainland from Chinese soil. The scale of violence against civilians went well beyond that military objective. The use of biological agents from Unit 731, and the contamination of wells and food supplies as troops withdrew, pointed to deliberate planning rather than battlefield excess. The testimony of a Japanese prisoner in 1944 provided evidence that those responsible were aware their own casualty figures had been falsified, and that the full scope of what happened in Zhejiang and Jiangxi was being suppressed from official records at the Nanking headquarters.