Pacification of Manchukuo
Japanese troops in Manchuria, 1931
| date | November 4, 1931 - February 23, 1942 |
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| place | Manchukuo |
| output | Japanese-Manchurian victory |
| Parties to the conflict | |
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| Commander | |
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| Troop strength | |
| over 300,000 fighters in total |
 approx. 84,000 soldiers  approx. 111,000 soldiers
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| losses | |
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The Pacification of Manchukuo was a campaign to pacify the newly established puppet state of Manchukuo between the anti-Japanese volunteer armies and various partisan groups of Manchuria, and later the communist Northeastern United Anti-Japanese Army on the one hand and the Imperial Japanese Army and Manchurian Army on the other. The campaign took place prior to and during the first half of the Second Sino-Japanese War and resulted in a Japanese-Manchurian victory.
Japan takes control
The earliest anti-Japanese partisan groups formed in the Fengtian and Kirin provinces after the Chinese Fengtian army had little resistance to the Japanese advance in the first month of the Japanese invasion of Manchuria and the Japanese successfully collaborated on the administration of the Fengtian and Kirin provinces To replace forces.
Much of the Fengtian provincial government fled to the western city of Jinzhou , while Governor Zang Shiyi stayed in Mukden . However, he refused to collaborate with the Japanese and form a separatist puppet government, which is why he was imprisoned. On September 21, 1931, the leadership of the Kwantung Army therefore announced a proclamation by which Colonel Kenji Doihara was installed as Mayor of Mukden. From then on, he ruled the city with the help of a so-called emergency committee , which was mainly formed from Japanese.
After the Japanese had succeeded in conquering the capital of Kirin Province, the city of Kirin , without a fight, they made the Chinese Lieutenant General Xi Qia on September 23, 1931, an offer to form a provisional government of the province. General Xi Qia agreed and on September 30, under the protection of the Imperial Japanese Army, declared the independence of Kirin Province from the Republic of China .
On September 24, 1931, a provisional government was established in Fengtian Province with Yuan Chin-hai as chairman of the Committee for the Maintenance of Peace and Order .
In addition, on September 27, 1931 , General Zhang Jinghui called a conference of leading politicians and military officials of the region in Harbin to discuss the organization of an emergency committee for the Special District . The aim of this committee should be the official separation of the Harbin area from the Republic of China. However, since the area around the city was almost completely under the control of anti-Japanese militias and regular troops of Generals Ding Chao , Li Du , Feng Zhanhai and others, and the city itself was ruled by the Japanese, the committee gained no influence.
Meanwhile, on November 10th, the Northeastern Administrative Committee was established by Yu Chung-han . This was a well-known politician from Zhang Xueliang's cabinet and favored extensive autonomy for Manchuria from China. After the Japanese defeated General Ma Zhanshan in the course of the Jiangqiao Campaign and occupied Qiqihar on November 19 , they formed a local government in Heilongjiang Province and installed General Zhang Jinghui as governor on January 1, 1932.
In the course of the Japanese conquest of Jinzhou , the independence movement began to rapidly gain influence in northern Manchuria, with massive support from Colonel Doihara and his subordinate intelligence units from Harbin. On January 7, 1932, General Zhang Jinghui, who after the defeat of Jinzhou was of the opinion that any further resistance against the Japanese was futile, followed a request by the Northeastern Administrative Committee and declared the independence of Heilongjiang Province. The defeated General Ma, who had withdrawn from Qiqihar to Hailun , refused to recognize this declaration of independence because he still considered himself the legal governor of Heilongjiang. Around the same time, Colonel Doihara began to contact Ma in order to persuade him to collaborate with the emerging state of Manchukuo. Although Ma agreed to the negotiations, he continued to support General Ding Chao, who was still resisting, in his fight against the Japanese.
Early resistance: militias, brotherhoods and bandits
The rapid defeat of the local government of Zhang Xueliang by the Japanese led to the resistance to the occupation becoming decentralized. Small groups of militias, brotherhoods and bandits formed in many places. A large part of the Japanese troops of the Kwantung Army were concentrated in the provinces of Heilongjiang and Fengtian against the troops of Ma Zhanshan and Zhang Xueliang, so that the resistance groups outside the cities and off the Japanese-patrolled railway lines in late 1931 and early 1932 more or less openly recruited fighters and could advertise their cause.
Militias
The situation in the outskirts of China meant that the central government in Manchuria has always been rather weak and bandits and warlords were a constant threat. As a result, landowners and local authorities set up militias to defend their own property before the Japanese invasion. Many of these militias became partisan groups after the occupation, despite their poor equipment, which gave themselves names such as self-defense militia , anti-Japanese militia or Chinese volunteers . One of the first known of these groups was the Brave Citizens' Militia , which formed in November 1931 in the coastal area of Jinzhou. Most of the militias were formed in southern Fengtian, where a good half of the inhabitants of Manchuria lived and the proportion of Han Chinese was particularly high. The presence of Japanese troops along the South Manchurian Railway long before the occupation of Manchuria had already given rise to strong anti-Japanese sentiments in the area.
Brotherhoods
Peasant brotherhoods were a traditional form of mutual protection organized by smallholders and landowners. Many refugees came to Manchuria during the warlord era wars in north and central China. From 1926 this number rose to over a million annually. Among these were many who belonged to the two predominant brotherhoods of the time, the Red Spear Society and the Great Swords Society , which began to organize their members in Manchuria against wandering bandits and fraudulent landowners.
The Red Spear Society had its centers in the hinterland of Fengtian and in the rural area of Harbin, while the Great Sword Society concentrated on the southern Kirin and small parts of Fengtian. The first uprising occurred in 1927 through the Great Swords Society. This was caused by the collapse of the Feng Piao currency and, if it was not supported by the peasants, at least respected by them, since the Great Swords only attacked the administrative officials of the warlord Zhang Zuolin .
Since the Japanese invasion there have been minor attacks by the Great Swords Society along the Korean-Manchurian border, which increased massively with the proclamation of Manchukuos on March 9, 1932. The great swords became the main factor of resistance in this area and began to form loose alliances with various anti-Japanese armies. The former bandit leader Lao Pie-fang became the commander of the Great Swords in western Fengtian, while they formed an alliance with General Wang Delin in southeastern Kirin . The former Chinese general Feng Zhanhai equipped a 4,000-strong corps of great swords at his own expense.
The individual groups of the Red Spear Society were spread out and therefore only carried out sporadic attacks. A center was the area around Mukden , in which there were many important coal mines. Its commander was a former Fengtian Army officer named Tang Juwu . Despite being widely dispersed, the Red Spear Society was able to offer resistance for an extraordinarily long time. On June 3, 1933, two years after the Mukden incident and long after the large volunteer armies had been broken up, a group of 1,000 Red Spears attacked administration buildings in Tungfeng Prefecture.
Nevertheless, both societies consisted mainly of uneducated and poorly equipped smallholders and had a traditionalist, quasi-religious character. Many trusted in the protection of magical rituals and the heavenly foresight of their fate. For example, many Great Swords claimed that they were spell-immune to bullets and that their death was if divinely predetermined. On the part of the Red Spear Society, Buddhist monks often went into battle and decorated both their weapons and those of others with religious and magical symbols, similar to what had happened during the Boxer Rebellion .
Bandits
Northeast China suffered particularly from the collapse of the central government at the beginning of the 20th century, so that an active bandit system was able to establish itself. While some of them robbed to get rich, many were casual bandits who, as a result of crop failures or other disasters, robbed people to support themselves and their families. This was facilitated by the massive immigration during the twenties, when many immigrants did not find a connection to society and thus became lepers. One of the most famous of these bandit groups in southern Manchuria was called Honghuzi (red beards). Often the bandits were simply called Shanlin , which means mountain and forest and alluded to their activity in the rural surroundings of the cities and their local knowledge there. Most of the groups, however, were only small alliances that operated in a spatially limited area and often had sympathizers and supporters among the local population. Because of this, the Chinese army had great problems fighting these groups effectively before the Japanese invasion.
There was also a kind of nationalist banditry. This was formed as a result of the Russian invasion of July 1900 when tsarist troops marched into Manchuria. This was done to protect the Russian-controlled Chinese Eastern Railway from the possible effects of the Boxer Rebellion . Wang Delin led the largest group against the Russians. However, since this also opposed the Qing Dynasty , it was referred to as a bandit troop. This force was active until 1917 when it was incorporated into the provincial forces of Kirin Province. This was a very common practice in the warlord era, as the bandits had at least basic training in weapons and tactics, making them a constant source of new recruits. After the Japanese defeated the provincial armies in 1931, thousands of these soldiers deserted and re-formed their old bandit groups.
As early as December 1931, the Japanese began large-scale operations to cleanse the country of bandits, who at that time mainly attacked civilian trains on the South Manchurian Railway. These operations meant that the bandits now also raided remote Japanese settlements and massively sabotaged the railway networks, which led to even harsher Japanese sanctions.
After the Japanese conquest, many bandits joined or converted their groups into volunteer armies. A well-known example of this is the Zhang Haitian (Old North Wind), which, despite its now existing partisan and freedom fighter character, continued to raid Chinese villages.
Formation of the Anti-Japanese Volunteer Armies
Resistance in Harbin
When General Xi Qia of the Kirin Army proclaimed the province's independence, the military and civil administrative authorities were divided into two camps. That of the New Kirin under Xi Qia and that of the Old Kirin , who was loyal to the Republic of China and opposed the New Kirin .
Hostilities in the Harbin area did not begin until late January 1932, around the same time as the January 28 incident . General Ding Chao decided to defend the city, an important rail and river junction in the north, against the forces of the New Kirin under Xi Qia and then those of the Japanese. He campaigned among the city's residents to join the fight, whereupon many hundreds joined his railroad troops and formed the Kirin Self-Defense Army . Although the Battle of Harbin was lost, the Ding Chaos Resistance inspired many local authorities in the Harbin area and in Fengtian to set up their own groups and militias to fight the Japanese occupation .
The Kirin Self-Defense Army, beaten by Ding Chaos , retreated northeast along the Sungari River and joined General Li Du's garrison forces, forming the core of the armed resistance in northern Kirin. Meanwhile, in southern Kirin, the Chinese People's National Liberation Army was formed on February 8, 1932, under General Wang Delin, a former battalion commander and bandit leader . While its crew strength was only about 1,000 soldiers at the beginning, it grew rapidly over the next few months and became a center of resistance and one of the most successful volunteer armies in the battles that followed.
Founding of Manchukuos
In the face of the defeat of Ding Chaos, Ma Zhanshan finally consented to Japanese wooing and joined the newly formed Manchurian Army on February 14, 1932 . As a reward for his collaboration, he was allowed to continue to serve as governor of Heilongjiang Province.
On February 27, 1932, Ding Chao made an armistice offer to the Japanese on behalf of the Republic of China, ending the official Chinese resistance in Manchuria.
The following day, Puyi , former Chinese emperor of the Qing Dynasty and overthrown during the Xinhai Revolution in 1911, was proclaimed president of the independent state of Manchukuo by an All-Manchurian congress in Mukden . Ma Zhanshan, who was flown in from the north especially for this purpose, also took part in this congress. A Manchurian Provisional Government was formed on March 1, under which Ma Zhanshan served as Minister of War in addition to his post as provincial governor. On March 9, the independence of Manchukuo State was officially declared. The Republic of China then announced that not only would they not recognize the state, but that Puyi had actually been kidnapped and held by the Japanese, invalidating the declaration of independence.
Despite the official armistice, the resistance was not stopped. By the end of February, the Chinese People's Liberation Army had destroyed a total of 18 bridges on the Kirin - Dunhua railway line , and on February 20, the city of Dunhua was captured by Wang's troops. A Japanese-Manchurian force sent to recapture it was repulsed in several smaller battles along the banks of the Jingpo Hu , losing hundreds of soldiers. The poorly equipped militias had the advantage of having knowledge of the terrain and were often able to lure their enemies into ambushes, which eventually led the Japanese to withdraw to Harbin for the time being.
The fact that the Japanese army suffered a military defeat by a mixed bag of ill-equipped irregular soldiers was tantamount to a foreign policy disaster. The Japanese tried hard to present Manchukuo to the world as a state that was founded out of the desire of the people and was absolutely peaceful. But now a League of Nations investigative commission has even been sent to Manchukuo to investigate the incident. The defeat also made waves in Manchukuo itself. As the news spread, hundreds of soldiers from the new Imperial Manchurian Army deserted and joined the Chinese People's Liberation Army with other volunteers . As a result, their strength grew by April from around 4,500 to over 10,000, possibly even almost 15,000 soldiers, who were organized in five brigades .
War of the Volunteer Armies and “Anti-Bandit Operations” 1932–1933
The conflict begins
At the end of winter 1932, the Japanese started a punitive expedition from Harbin along the Sungari and the Chinese Eastern Railway into the interior of Kirin Province to smash the Kirin Self-Defense Army, whose Commander-in-Chief Ding Chao did not abide by the ceasefire agreement concluded with the Japanese. In this operation, which lasted from March to June 1932, the Kirin Self-Defense Army was driven from the banks of the Sungari and from the core of Kirin, but it continued to offer resistance and occupied various villages along the Chinese Eastern Railway near the Soviet border.
In the southwest, another volunteer army under General Li Hai-ching controlled the surrounding area from Fuyu to Nong'an . This army called itself the Anti-Japanese Army for the Liberation of the Country and even had light artillery and several machine guns, which it had taken over from the former regular Chinese troops. On March 29, 1932, at the gates of Nong'an, only about 55 kilometers from the new Manchurian capital Xinjing , they defeated a Manchurian army under the command of the former Chinese general Xi Qia. This victory was mainly only possible because the day before the volunteer army attacked an ammunition transport that was secured by around 100 military police and captured around 200,000 rounds of rifle ammunition and 50,000 mortar shells. This transport was on its way to Nong'an, which the Manchurian troops had conquered in the meantime, but which in return ran out of ammunition and were thus forced to retreat or surrender.
Smaller Japanese units that had emerged from Xinjing to support them were brought to a standstill before Nong'an with heavy losses. Troops sent from Dehui from the east could no longer intervene in time to prevent the surrender of parts of the Manchurian troops and the retreat of the rest, but managed to finally conquer Nong'an on March 30 with air support.
The revolt of Ma Zhanshan
Although he was provincial governor and Minister of War of Manchukuos, the Japanese did not trust Ma Zhanshan and had him monitored by their secret service . Furthermore, he had to consult Japanese advisors on all important decisions and ask for their approval. Dissatisfied with this situation, Ma began to secretly steal money and weapons from the Japanese, which were intended for the equipment of the Imperial Manchurian Army, and to re-equip his former private army. In his capacity as governor of Heilongjiang, he officially recruited these soldiers for the Imperial Manchurian Army and brought their families to safety before he and his troops left Tsitsihar on April 1, 1932 to embark on a military reconnaissance operation.
When he reached Heihe on April 7 , Ma proclaimed the independence of Heilongjiang Province from Manchukuo and organized his troops, together with the local garrison and new volunteers, into nine new brigades by early May. He also set up eleven volunteer garrisons across the province. Together with the previous core troops, these formed the new Northeast Anti-Japanese National Liberation Army . Ma was also declared commander in chief of all subsequently formed anti-Japanese volunteer armies, which at their peak, according to Japanese estimates, comprised up to 300,000 fighters.
After sending some detachments to the lower Sungari to support Ding Chaos, Ma and the rest of his troops set off for Harbin. Among other things, they carried 20 howitzers and were supported by a small squadron of seven aircraft. Ma was able to lure and smash smaller enemy groups that were sent towards him, but had to realize that he could not do anything against the Manchurian and Japanese troops that were gathering in front of Harbin at the moment and therefore turned southwest towards Tsitsihar.
At about the same time, smaller, independent partisan groups began raiding Japanese and Manchurian facilities throughout Heilongjiang Province. The troops of the Imperial Manchurian Army sent to contain the unrest either did not dare to leave the immediate vicinity of the railway lines on which they were advancing, or they went directly to the partisans or the troops of Mas. This absence of troops led to bandit gangs reuniting, especially along the Chinese Eastern Railway, and raiding towns and villages.
To regain control, the Japanese Army began an April to July 1932 operation to overthrow Ma Zhanshan. The Japanese advanced along the Harbin-Hailung and Tsitsihar-Keshan railways to halt the advance of Ma’s troops. Wherever possible and where the opportunity existed, the Japanese troops split up in order to encircle and crush smaller units of Ma's army. As the Japanese became more and more successful with this tactic, General Ma ordered his troops on June 8, 1932, not to face the enemy and to use guerrilla tactics. Only his personal guard of 1,000 men continued to fight as a firmly organized association. However, this loose tactic with no real commanders ensured that many of the volunteers withdrew from the resistance and simply returned to their families. The remaining troops were only able to offer little resistance to the Japanese, and after his bodyguards had shrunk to a few men by July and Ma had barely escaped Japanese encirclement, he went into hiding for the time being.
Revolts by the volunteer armies south of Harbin
At the end of April, a force of around 3,000 Chinese soldiers under General Li Hai-ching destroyed the route of the Chinese Eastern Railway about 105 kilometers south of Harbin. They removed rails and beams, damaged the embankment and cut a parallel telegraph line. A train from Harbin, which had to stop at the destroyed site, was looted by them before they retreated as Japanese troops approached.
In eastern Manchukuo, Wang Delin's troops burned three smaller train stations and looted the town of Suifenhe near the Soviet border. However, these attacks were initially ascribed to Li Hai-ching's soldiers. Because of this, the Japanese withdrew units from the relatively quiet south of Fengtian Province in May 1932 and, together with Manchurian soldiers, started a punitive expedition to Li's headquarters, where they were able to destroy most of his troops.
However, the absence of the troops led Chinese General Tang Juwu to think the time was ripe to rebel against the authorities. He had secretly equipped around 20,000 soldiers and with them now circled the Japanese garrison in the city of Tonghua . Manchurian units sent as relief could neither defeat nor significantly weaken Tang's army, but after the first clashes he decided to break off the siege because he feared further enemy reinforcements. With his still powerful army, however, he remained a constant threat factor for the city of Mukden and the Japanese supply routes to Korea and engaged in sustained skirmishes with both the Japanese Kwantung Army and the Manchurian Fengtian Provincial Army. Like many other volunteer armies, Tang benefited from the fact that the summer of 1932 was a climax in the spirit of resistance of the Manchurian population, so that in many places more volunteers reported than could be armed and supplied with weapons.
Also in May, a division of the Kirin Self-Defense Army of around 15,000 soldiers under Feng Zhanhai succeeded in breaking communication lines south and east of Harbin. In response, two parallel Japanese-Manchurian operations were carried out from June to July 1932 to crush Feng's force. Although this goal could not be fully achieved, Feng withdrew as a result with the remnants of his troops to the west and thus no longer posed a threat to Harbin.
In August, the Nen Jiang and Sungari Rivers burst their banks and flooded an area of over 30,000 km² in the vicinity of Harbin. The flood halted operations by both the Japanese and the volunteer armies, which reached their peak in the summer of 1932. However, since large parts of the harvest, which would be less due to the ongoing fighting, were destroyed in the course of the flood, the volunteer armies came under great pressure. The impending famine deprived them of the support of the population and raids to obtain food caused public opinion to change.
Defeat of the volunteer armies
During the flood, groups of Mongolian bandits crossed the border and raided isolated places such as the small town of Tongyu . The population was either disappointed by the volunteer armies that they did nothing against the bandits, or attributed the raids to them themselves. When a Manchurian force, dispatched on August 20, took back the city of Tongyu on August 31, the civilian attitude towards the volunteer armies even became openly hostile in many places.
An operation launched by the Manchurian Kiringarde on September 2 succeeded in almost completely crushing Feng Zhanhai's troops, which were already in retreat. As a result, the operational organization of the volunteer armies was almost completely destroyed and the possibility of coordinated attacks was no longer available for the time being.
Su Bingwen's revolt
In the far west of Heilongjiang, on the Soviet border, General Su Bingwen had hitherto avoided taking his troops openly on the side of Manchukuo or Ma Zhanshan and so far had remained unmolested on both sides. This enabled the farmers in the area he controlled to bring in their harvest undisturbed in late summer and thus created a supply base for later operations.
When the Japanese began to move their troops south in late September 1932 in order to protect the industrial plants there from the volunteer armies, Su Bingwen openly sided with the insurgents on September 27 and took hundreds of Japanese settlers and soldiers from isolated Japanese bases as their own Hostages. He then moved with his troops, which called themselves Heilongjiang's National Liberation Army , eastward to unite with the scattered remnants of Ma Zhanshan.
After his troops were defeated by the Japanese, he had withdrawn to the Xing'an Mountains on the Amur and tried to reorganize his army. When he found out about Sus revolt, he left the mountains and joined Su in Longmen County.
In Heilongjiang, however, there was not enough food available in the course of the floods in the summer to supply larger troops and due to the poor infrastructure, Su Bingwen could not get enough food from his area. Therefore, the revolt increasingly took the form of a raid from town to town to plunder the granaries of the farmers.
In mid-October, Ma’s soldiers captured the town of Antachen, west of Harbins, and forced the residents to hand over the equivalent of $ 50,000 and all of their horses before they left. On October 26, they attacked the city of Laha, 110 kilometers north of Tsitsihar. When they realized that there was a Japanese garrison in the city, they bombed it with their remaining artillery and destroyed much of the city itself in the process.
The Japanese got a first impression of the strength of Su Bingwen's and Ma Zhanshan's troops on November 8th, when Sergeant Iwakami arrived in Tsitsihar and reported how around 4,000 insurgents had wiped out his entire unit at Yi'an .
In response, the Japanese dispatched around 30,000 soldiers from their 14th Infantry Division and cavalry from the Manchurian Hsingan Army. On November 28, the troops clashed for the first time near Tsitsihar. At the same time, Japanese planes bombed Ma's headquarters, which the latter had set up in Hailar . On December 3rd, the Japanese attacked the city directly, forcing Ma and Su to withdraw from it. They both crossed the Soviet border on December 5th while many of their troops withdrew in small groups into Jehol Province .
Final operations in eastern Manchukuo
With the gathering of Japanese troops against Su and Ma in the west, there was one last major uprising in other areas of Manchukuo. Bandit groups with over 1,000 men and larger units of the Red Spear Society carried out massive attacks on railway lines and Japanese and Manchurian garrisons. In the course of these raids, a militia of the Red Spear Society captured the small town of Pingdingshan on September 15, 1932 . When the Japanese retook the city the next day, the so-called Pingdingshan massacre occurred , in which over 3,000 civilians were killed and only one resident of the city survived.
Meanwhile, the Japanese succeeded in the west in the course of October to find and smash the last remnants of Li Hai-ching's troops, consisting of about 3,000 soldiers who had invaded Heilongjiang again. The scattered remains fled to Jehol province, as did the troops of Si Bingwen and Ma Zhanshan later.
In mid-October, the Japanese finally managed to finally regain the initiative in eastern Manchukuo. They estimated Tang Juwu's troops in southern and eastern Fengtian at around 30,000 men and therefore dispatched an army of seven brigades from the Manchurian Fengtian Army, two Japanese cavalry brigades and one mixed brigade on October 11. Starting from Tungpientao District, they attacked Tang's troops near Tonghua and Huanren and were finally able to encircle Tang. Although he managed to escape, he subsequently lost control of large parts of his troops, which slowly disbanded. When Tonghua and Huanren were captured on October 16 and 17, the Japanese-Manchurian troops suffered losses of around 500 men, while the insurgents took 270 dead and around 1,000 prisoners.
Subsequently, the same troops turned to the area between Mukden, Xinjing and Kirin until November, in which guerrilla units Wang Delins were still. However, these did not offer any serious resistance and their remnants withdrew towards Huinan and Siping.
From November 6 to 20, around 5,000 Manchurian soldiers cleared the Ki Feng-lung district of the last nests of resistance. In this operation, in addition to units from the Fengtian and Kirin armies, the Jing'an guerrilla unit (Jing'an youjidui) , a later special unit of the Imperial Manchurian Guard, was used for the first time.
From November 22nd to December 5th there was another operation against Tang Juwu's troops. In addition to the Jing'an youjidui , Chinese militias from near the Korean border were also deployed on the Manchukuo's side. In addition to numerous dead, around 1,800 men from Tang's troops were captured. Many of them later joined the Imperial Manchurian Army to escape captivity. This operation marked the end of Tang Juwu's army.
On December 24th, the Japanese 10th Division attacked guerrilla forces north of the Mudanjiang River. On January 5, 1933, General Kuan Chang-ching and his volunteers surrendered to the Japanese at Suifenhe . On January 7th Mishan could be retaken before General Li Du and his troops fled across the border into the Soviet Union on January 9th , which ended operations north of the Mudanjiang.
By the end of February 1933, most of the larger volunteer armies had been broken up, had broken up into small guerrilla units or had fled to the Soviet Union.
consequences
This was not the end of the volunteer armies per se. Many continued to fight in small guerrilla units, which, however, often did not differ in their actions from the bandit groups known as Shanlin . In fact, most of the units had ex-bandit commanders whose experience in guerrilla warfare and wilderness survival in the harsh Manchurian winter meant that these troops would pose a constant threat to Japanese and Manchurian troops for years to come.
This and the unreliability of the Imperial Manchurian Army meant that the Japanese were forced to permanently station strong formations in Manchuria, whereby one of the desired main effects of the establishment of Manchukuo, the stabilization of the region and the sinization of the conflict, was not achieved. It also strengthened the Kwantung Army , whose independent action was viewed with suspicion in Tokyo. Although the Imperial Manchurian Army carried out its own anti-partisan operations, such as a new pacification mission in Kirin in October and November 1933, in which over 35,000 Manchurian soldiers were involved, the Japanese trusted these troops so little that they did so on such operations always kept their own task forces ready and often took over the command.
Many of the troops that fled to unoccupied China or the Soviet Union later played a role in the fight against the Japanese. Feng Zhanhai's soldiers were later accepted as a regular division in the National Revolutionary Army and fought in the Second Sino-Japanese War . Tang Juwu later became commander of a corps of the Northeastern United Anti-Japanese Army and fought behind the Japanese lines with a small force after the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War, where he was killed on May 18, 1939. Su Bingwen served on the General Staff of the Kuomintang Government and conducted troop inspections. Due to his temporary cooperation with the Japanese, Ma Zhanshan was only pardoned after the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War and served as a front-line commander. From August 1940 he was again declared the Chinese governor of Heilongjiang Province, which is still under Manchurian control, and held this position until the end of the war.
The commanders who remained in Manchukuo often face a cruel fate if they do not stop fighting. Wang Fengge was captured in 1937 and executed along with his wife and child. Wu Yicheng, a former officer of Wang Delin, fought with a small number of henchmen until 1937 before he too died. When Kong Xianrong, another officer of Wang, wanted to stop the fight, his wife and Yao Zhenshan took command of his troops and resisted until the spring of 1941, when their group was destroyed along with their leaders.
Communists and the Northeastern United Anti-Japanese Army 1934–1942
Early conflicts with the anti-Japanese armies
After the Japanese invasion of Manchuria in 1931, the Chinese Communist Party formed a number of small guerrilla groups to both fight the Japanese and promote the social revolution in Manchuria. These groups were deliberately kept small compared to the anti-Japanese volunteer armies so that they could operate more covertly.
Especially at the beginning, the volunteer armies were perceived by the communists as a hostile threat. They did not trust them and feared that the Japanese might use an alleged retreat of the volunteer armies into Soviet territory as a pretext to attack them, which would have threatened Soviet support for the Chinese communists. For these reasons, the Communist Party secretly campaigned among the volunteers to murder their officers and join the social revolution.
Nevertheless, a large number of party members joined the volunteer armies, some of which made it into leading positions, such as Li Yanlu and Zhou Baozhong, who made it to leading ranks in Wang Delin's National Liberation Army of the Chinese People's Army .
This and a latent support of the volunteer armies by the Comintern since 1935 ensured that the party changed its policy over time. They feared that they would become irrelevant to the anti-Japanese resistance and so gradually lose all support in Manchuria. Little by little, the goal of social revolution was pushed into the background to that of expelling the Japanese from Chinese territory.
After the defeat of most of the volunteer armies in the course of 1934, the party rallied many of the remaining fighters - all in all, the not yet defeated volunteer armies still had an estimated 50,000 men at that time - and organized them together with the remaining communist guerrilla troops into the centrally led one Northeastern United Anti-Japanese Army under the command of Zhao Shangzhi . This new army was open to anyone who wished to support them in their fight against the Japanese, and it also succeeded in recruiting some of the Shanlin gangs over time.
The United Army
In 1935 the party changed its official policy and began to form the United Front. Her army then incorporated most of the remaining anti-Japanese groups in Manchuria and some Korean resistance fighters, including the later North Korean dictator Kim Il-sung , into their troops. In the course of 1935 a force of around 40,000 fighters was built up. This was divided into the 1st March Army in Fengtian under Yang Jingyu , the 2nd March Army in Kirin under Zhou Baozhong and the 3rd March Army in Heilongjiang under Li Zhaolin . The aim of these armies was to create small pockets of resistance across the country in order to disrupt the administration of the country, and after the beginning of the Second Sino-Japanese War in 1937, to bind as many Japanese troops as possible so that they would not enter the Chinese heartland could be dispatched. In 1936 and 1937 in particular, they were very successful with this and in some cases led the administration to the verge of collapse.
From October 1936 to March 1937, the still young Manchurian Army therefore carried out an operation with 16,000 soldiers against the 1st March Army. This was the Manchurian Army's first stand-alone operation without Japanese support. Despite heavy losses of her own, she was able to kill more than 2,000 insurgents in the course of the campaign, including some high-ranking officers. These and other operations resulted in the total number of insurgents, which in 1936 was around 30,000, in 1937 was only an estimated 20,000 men.
From November 1937 to March 1939 a series of even larger operations with a total of 24,000 Manchurian soldiers were carried out against the 2nd March Army in the area between the rivers Amur , Sungari and Ussuri . In the second half of 1938 the Japanese army began to concentrate troops in eastern Fengtian in order to smash the remnants of the 1st March Army. This had proved to be the strongest of the three armies with a broad support base in the population, and the Japanese saw in its destruction the key to the destruction of the United Army.
Even before the start of the operation in September 1938, the number of enemy soldiers had dropped to an estimated 10,000, a result of years of fighting and the increasingly effective planned Japanese and Manchurian operations. At the beginning of January 1940 it finally succeeded in enclosing the remains of the 1st Marching Army and their leader Yang Jingyu died on February 23, 1940 when he and his command staff tried to escape from the cauldron and was betrayed by one of his officers.
After the destruction of the strongest communist force, the resistance began to crumble and many fighters, including Kim Il-sung, fled to Soviet Siberia between 1940 and 1942 . In November 1941, Li Zhaolin fled with the remnants of his 3rd Marching Army to the Soviet Union, and on February 12, 1942, Zhao Shangzhi, the last senior communist commander in Manchuria, was arrested by Japanese military intelligence and later died of the injuries sustained in the process. This date is seen as the end of the operations to pacify Manchukuos.
literature
- Hsu Long-hsuen, Chang Ming-kai: History of The Sino-Japanese War (1937–1945) 2nd Edition . Chung Wu Publishing, 1971.
- Phillip S. Jowett: Rays of The Rising Sun, Armed Forces of Japan's Asian Allies 1931-45, Volume I: China & Manchuria . Helion & Co., 2004.
- Guo Rugui: 中国 抗日战争 正面 战场 作战 记 (China's Anti-Japanese War Combat Operations). Jiangsu People's Publishing House, 2005.
Web links
- IMTFE Judgment, Conquest & Occupation of Manchuria
- The Volunteer Armies of Northeast China by Anthony Coogan
- Issue of TIME Magazine, January 25, 1932
Individual evidence
- ^ Pingdingshan Massacre Memorial ( July 7, 2011 memento in the Internet Archive )