Hundred Regiments Offensive

The Hundred Regiments Offensive ( Chinese : 百团大战), also known as the Battle of the Hundred Regiments , took place in central China between August 20 and December 5, 1940. It was a large-scale campaign by the Chinese Red Army against the Japanese army .

overview

After the Chinese Communist Party under General Zhu De had managed to recruit more than 400,000 soldiers by 1940, he and Peng Dehuai ordered a large-scale guerrilla offensive against the Japanese without the consent of Mao Zedong . After initial successes in which the Chinese had already suffered many casualties, the tide turned after a new general took command of the Japanese armed forces and the Chinese suffered from a bloody wave of persecution.

prehistory

After the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese War in early July 1937 and the steady advance of the Japanese in northern China, the Chinese of the Kuomintang won their first important victory in the Battle of Tai'erzhuang in 1938 . The Communist Party under Mao Zedong had already fled the Kuomintang in the Long March to Yan'an in 1935 and is now building a new base there. An anti-Japanese university was established, teaching Mao's teachings, but also military training. The communists waged an intense guerrilla war to which the Japanese responded by destroying villages and killing members of the communist party. Between 1939 and 1940, the Japanese occupiers launched more than 109 small campaigns, each with around 1,000 fighters, and 10 larger campaigns, in each of which around 10,000 soldiers took part. The aim was to exterminate the Chinese communists in the plains of Hebei and Shandong . In addition, Wang Jingwei's puppet government launched an offensive against the communist guerrillas. There was also great displeasure against the communists among the fighters of the Kuomintang. They accused them of not participating in the resistance struggles against the Japanese and only having an interest in building their own base in the West. For these reasons, the Red Army began planning a major offensive. Not only to show that they too had an interest in fighting the Japanese, but also essentially out of an effort to improve their relations with the Kuomintang.

Course of the battle

At the end of 1939, the Japanese leadership assumed a troop strength of around 88,000 fighters among the Chinese Communists in northern China. Two years later, they raised their estimate to around 140,000. Shortly before the offensive began, the troop strength actually reached 400,000 soldiers, who were divided into 115 regiments . This strong growth and the success of smaller operations against the Japanese led Zhu De and the other military leaders to hope that they could now launch a major offensive against the occupying power. Mao, however, argued against an offensive and spoke out in favor of underground actions, political mobilization and the establishment of own bases.

Since the increase in fighters in 1940 was so impressive, Zhu De ordered a coordinated offensive by most of the communist units. These included 46 regiments of the 115th Division, 47 regiments of the 129th Division and 22 regiments of the 120th Division. They were supposed to carry out attacks on the cities held by the Japanese and the railroad lines connecting them. Between August 20 and September 10, they attacked the lines connecting communist base bases, specifically those from Dezhou to Shijiazhuang in Hebei , Shijiazhuang to Taiyuan in central Shanxi and Taiyuan to Datong in north Shanxi. They began by blowing up tunnels and bridges and destroying sections of the route, as well as direct attacks on Japanese garrisons from the end of September . They suffered high losses of up to 22,000 men. The Japanese lost an estimated 3,000 to 4,000 fighters in the process. A total of around 960 kilometers of rails were destroyed by the Chinese and the coal mine in Jingxing , which is important for the Japanese war industry, was shut down for half a year.

The offensive marks the communist forces' greatest victory during the Second Sino-Japanese War.

aftermath

The Japanese managed to restore the rail connections between October and December with great effort. In addition, they began with so-called "clean-ups" in the vicinity of the routes. When General Okamura Yasuji took command of the Japanese armed forces in northern China the following summer , the motto under him was "Everything three times: Kill everything - burn everything - destroy everything" in the areas where communist units were suspected. The population in the main communist areas then decreased dramatically. This also contained the communist operations. The forces of the Red Army sank to about 300,000 men. The number of counties they control also decreased from 437 to just 10 in northern China. Mao Zedong used the following harmonization campaign to rebuild his supremacy in the party and also to bring the military leadership behind him. As a result, the Red Army largely withdrew from national defense and left the initiative to the Kuomintang.

Peng Dehuai was heavily criticized by Mao for revealing the combat strength of the Red Army against the Kuomintang through his offensive. This was one of the reasons why the Hundred Regiments Offensive was the last of the two major engagements of the Chinese Communists against the Japanese. Peng was removed from his post as Prime Minister in 1959 after the Lushan Conference due to open criticism of Mao's economic policy ( Great Leap Forward ).