War Overview · Fourteen-Year War of Resistance (1931–45)

From a single night in Shenyang to the warship in Tokyo Bay where surrender was received, fourteen years and 35 million military and civilian casualties: a country a generation behind in equipment and an order of magnitude behind in industry used space, human lives, and a will that would not surrender to hold down and wear out East Asia's strongest military machine. This is the main battlefield of the entire *Whence We Came* series.

Engagement Data

Belligerents (War-Level)

Historical Setting (Stage by Stage)

• 1931–37 (localized resistance): The world in the Great Depression had no attention to spare for East Asia, and the League of Nations appeased; Japan's military was driven toward expansion by gekokujo, "the lower overriding the higher"; China was torn between "internal pacification before external resistance" and a public wave of anti-Japanese feeling -- the Northeast fell, North China was eaten away (Tanggu Truce, He–Umezu Agreement, East Hebei puppet regime), and the December 9th Movement (1935) and Xi'an Incident (1936.12) turned national policy around.
• 1937–41 (holding on alone): Full-scale war broke out, and the international community offered words without real support; Soviet aid to China (aviation volunteers, loans, and arms, 1937–41) was the only substantial foreign aid, then faded after the Soviet–Japanese Neutrality Pact of 1941.4; Wang Jingwei fled in 1938 and established a puppet government in 1940 -- the fork between surrender and fighting appeared in the darkest place.
• 1941–45 (incorporated into the world war): After Pearl Harbor, the China Theater was established (Chiang Kai-shek as commander, Stilwell as chief of staff); Lend-Lease and the Flying Tigers took shape; the Cairo Declaration (1943.11) promised the return of the Northeast, Taiwan, and Penghu; the Henan–Hunan–Guangxi collapse and the Stilwell crisis followed (1944); the Yalta secret agreement exchanged Chinese interests for Soviet entry into the war against Japan (1945.2, with China absent -- once again, "China disposed of while China was absent"); Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Soviet entry into the war, and the 8.15 Jewel Voice Broadcast followed.

Why It Was Fought

The civil war had only just stopped when the foreign war had already opened. The military remonstrance at Xi'an turned the guns of the KMT and CPC outward, but the Japanese had acted long before that turn. On the night of September 18, 1931, the Kwantung Army blew up a section of track on the South Manchuria Railway it was itself guarding, then immediately attacked Shenyang: front-line military units began the war on their own timetable, while Tokyo's civilian cabinet knew nothing beforehand and ratified it afterward. The Northeast Army was ordered not to offer frontal resistance, and all of the Northeast was lost in four months; who issued the order of "non-resistance," and in what wording, has been argued over for eighty years (source unverified), but the loss of the Northeast is fact.

The six years that followed were Japan cutting and China enduring: Rehe, the passes of the Great Wall, the Tanggu Truce, the North China Autonomy Movement, each retreat moving step by step to the Marco Polo Bridge. Why did the retreat stop here? The memory that the Northeast had been lost at no cost was still present; if North China were yielded again, no government could answer for it at home; after the Xi'an Incident, a government that continued to retreat before Japan would first lose its own footing. The gunfire outside Wanping on the night of July 7, 1937 became, ten days later, the Lushan declaration of the "last moment"; on August 13, fighting began in Shanghai. Choosing Shanghai as the decisive battlefield was meant to twist the Japanese army's main axis of attack from north-to-south into east-to-west, and also to make the war visible to the whole world inside the concessions (original telegrams and documents on the strategic intent unverified). The determination as put on paper lay in the Lushan speech of July 17 and the National Defense Conference for provincial military and political chiefs summoned to the capital in mid-August (schedule and resolution texts unverified); on the desk was the comparison of the two sides' military and industrial strength. This was not a resolve made in ignorance of the gap.

Tokyo's account book used a different arithmetic. Japan's industry and firepower stood one order of magnitude above China's, and its plan was a rapid war: hurt the Nanjing government badly enough to force it to the negotiating table, have it recognize the status quo in Manchuria and North China, and then stop the fighting. In January 1938, Konoe's statement that Japan would "no longer deal with the National Government" effectively welded the door to peace talks shut; Wuhan and Guangzhou fell, yet the Chinese government moved into Chongqing and still did not surrender. With every additional inch the Japanese forces occupied, the supply line lengthened by another inch, and the "China Incident" became a mire with no visible end. What it had not calculated was that a country that had lost all of its coastal core could still continue fighting with relocated factories, the Hump air route, and a will not to surrender.

China's material conditions fixed its method of fighting from the opening: customs, salt tax, and consolidated tax, the three major sources of revenue, were rooted along the coast and the Yangtze and shrank as those areas fell; steel output was in the tens of thousands of tons against millions, ammunition depended half on foreign purchase, and once the coast was lost only the Yunnan–Burma Road remained; troop numbers ran to the millions on paper, yet there was no general mobilization law, and recruitment was carried out through press-ganging conscripts. These accounts could be made before the war began. From the first day, the only possible method was to drag the war out.

On the CPC side, determination was set half at the negotiating table in Xi'an and half at Luochuan. In August 1937, the Red Army was reorganized as the Eighth Route Army, and three divisions with more than 40,000 men moved into North China; what the Luochuan Conference set was not positional battle against the Japanese army, but independent mountain guerrilla warfare. Given its firepower and supply at the time, frontal attrition meant being spent to nothing. The result was that war was carried into the countryside and base areas were spread behind enemy lines; it also buried in the same ground the frictions that would later emerge between the two parties.

Other roads did exist. Before the war began, there were already pro-peace voices in Nanjing -- the "Low-Key Club" of Zhou Fohai, Hu Shih, and others (membership and activities unverified); within the Japanese side, after July 7, Ishiwara Kanji's "non-expansion" faction still wanted to hold down reinforcements, but was overridden by the line of "a blow against China." In the winter of 1937, the Trautmann mediation was heard in Chongqing and not accepted (terms and course of refusal unverified); at the end of 1938, Wang Jingwei fled to Hanoi and set up another "peace movement," and surrender and resistance formally forked. The forces blocking the road on both sides failed to change their own timetables: on China's side, public opinion would not allow another retreat; on Japan's side, the structure of gekokujo would not allow the brakes to be applied. Chongqing and Yan'an each chose to continue fighting. Once made, that choice meant another seven years.

Course of the Engagement (Four Stages Across Fourteen Years)

Three Battlefields (Structural Note)

1. Front-line battlefield (National Government forces): the twenty-two major campaigns as the skeleton, bearing the pressure of the main Japanese forces and suffering the heaviest casualties. 2. Battlefields behind enemy lines (CPC Eighth Route Army and New Fourth Army): a system of guerrilla warfare and base-area governments, pinning down large numbers of Japanese and puppet forces; the Hundred Regiments Offensive was the largest active offensive. 3. Isolated battlefields: the Northeast Anti-Japanese United Army (the most isolated), the Yunnan–Burma Expeditionary Force (the only one outside China), and the air and naval fronts (the most unequal). The relationship between the front-line and behind-the-lines battlefields -- cooperation, friction (Southern Anhui Incident, 1941.1 ※ cross-referenced), and each side's separate persistence -- is recorded from both sides; this is the root of the narrative divergence over the "two battlefields."

Casualties and Losses

• Military and civilian casualties exceeded 35 million (official statistical basis: about 3.8 million military casualties, with civilians making up the overwhelming majority); additional research statistical bases are placed side by side (details unrecorded).
• ※ Systematic atrocity nodes (see separate articles for each): Nanjing Massacre (300,000 figure and international tribunal findings), Bombing of Chongqing, "Three Alls" mopping-up operations, biological warfare (Unit 731 and bacterial attacks in Zhejiang–Jiangxi and Changde), chemical warfare, the "comfort women" system, and forced labor abductions -- this overview sets out this list to give the system of atrocities an overall table of contents beyond the separate articles (population figures for each item are marked in the separate articles).
• Tens of millions of refugees were displaced; universities moved west, and factories moved inland (Yichang evacuation, 1938); Yellow River flooded area ※ (Huayuankou, a self-inflicted disaster).
• Property losses by the official statistical basis were USD 60 billion (1937 values; statistical bases vary by account).
• Japanese forces: about 400,000-plus killed in China (Japanese Ministry of Health and Welfare basis) to Chinese statistics of 1.33 million killed and wounded (cumulative figures from successive battle reports) -- the two bases differ sharply, with different statistical boundaries (whether wounded and sick are included, and whether the Northeast and Burma are included); the two accounts are placed side by side, with neither chosen over the other.

Aftermath

• Taiwan, Penghu, and the Northeast returned; the unequal treaty system was abolished during the war (1943 new Sino-U.S. and Sino-British treaties) -- the legal ending of a century of national humiliation was completed in this war.
• Founding permanent member of the United Nations Security Council: the name of one of the "world's four powers" was bought at the cost of 35 million casualties.
• But peace did not arrive: surrender and takeover immediately became KMT–CPC struggle (see *Chinese Civil War · Overview*) -- the endpoint of the War of Resistance Against Japan was directly the starting point of the civil war.
• Disposition of Japan: Tokyo Trial and Nanjing trials; the path of reparations was later abandoned (1972); war memory became a permanent variable in China–Japan relations thereafter.
• Military legacy: this war remade the entire backbone of the two Chinese armies that followed -- almost every commander of the Chinese Civil War and the War to Resist U.S. Aggression and Aid Korea carried the growth rings of the War of Resistance Against Japan.

How Each Side Records It

• Chinese side: a war of national survival and the turning point in a century of decline; the center of the narrative changed over time -- after 1949, it long took the battlefields behind enemy lines as its main thread; from the 1980s, the front-line battlefield was gradually restored to writing (the 1986 film on Tai'erzhuang as a marker); the 2015 military parade and the "Fourteen-Year War of Resistance" textbooks (2017) set the current framework -- the history of narrative change is recorded as well.
• Japanese side: called the "Second Sino-Japanese War" (formerly the "China Incident" -- because war was fought without a declaration, it was called an "incident"; the name itself is a position); a split between memories of "perpetration" and "victimhood" (the atomic-bombing narrative is strong, while the narrative of the invasion of China is equivocal), with textbook issues and Yasukuni as continuing disputes; there are also lines that face historical facts directly, such as the Ienaga Saburo lawsuits and veterans' testimony movements -- both sides are recorded.
• Third parties: The West long underestimated the China theater ("forgotten ally" -- Rana Mitter's book title says this directly), with historiography reappraising it in recent years; Soviet/Russian narratives emphasize the single episode of Soviet entry into the war in 1945.

Disputes and Sensitivities

• The dispute over the contributions of the two battlefields: behind the war of numbers (enemy losses inflicted, numbers pinned down) lies a struggle over orthodoxy, and the statistical bases of both sides are placed side by side.
• The chain of responsibility for "non-resistance" and the appeasement phase (Tanggu, He–Umezu): each case is handled in the separate articles.
• The Wang Jingwei puppet regime and the theory of "saving the nation by a roundabout path": puppet regimes appear as matters arise in each engagement.
• Yalta, the Sino-Soviet Treaty (1945.8), and Outer Mongolia: land lost within victory, also inside this stretch of history.
• Divergent statistical bases for casualties and enemy losses inflicted: this is the heaviest numerical battlefield in the entire series, with each side's statistics existing side by side.

Contents (By Area)

This article is divided into five lines: localized resistance, the front-line battlefield, battlefields behind enemy lines, the Yunnan–Burma Theater, and the air-sea and foreign-war-in-China fronts; after 1937 several fronts ran in parallel for a long time, and the articles below are arranged chronologically and may be read by line. The Defense of Nanjing, Lanfeng and Huayuankou, the Battle of Zhejiang–Jiangxi, counter-"mopping-up" operations, the Savage Mountains, and the Bombing of Chongqing are still handled under ※. The Battle of Henan–Hunan–Guangxi is expanded through Central Henan, the Fourth Battle of Changsha, Defense of Hengyang, and Battle of Guilin–Liuzhou.

[Foreign war on Chinese soil] Siege of Tsingtao (1914)1914.08Three months after the First World War broke out, Japanese and British forces attacked the German leased territory of Tsingtao in Shandong, China: Europe's war opened an Asian front on Chinese soil. China declared neutrality and marked out a war zone, then watched Japanese forces move beyond it and occupy the entire Jiaozhou-Jinan Railway: one leaseholder was driven out, and a larger one arrived.Mukden Incident1931.09A short stretch of railway blown up by the Kwantung Army itself, Shenyang lost in a single night, the entire Northeast lost in just over four months -- the Fourteen-Year War of Resistance is counted from here.Northeast Volunteer Army and the Anti-Japanese United Army (1931–1942)1931.10After the Northeast fell, hundreds of thousands first rose with whatever arms they had and then scattered; later, a lone force held out in mountains at forty degrees below zero until only a little more than a thousand remained, and still would not put down its rifles -- the most isolated line of the Fourteen-Year War of Resistance.Resistance at Jiangqiao (Nen River Bridge)1931.10After the Mukden Incident, at the bridgehead over the Nen River, Ma Zhanshan said the first "no" to Japanese forces and fought for half a month -- the story of the "first shot of organized armed resistance against Japan" begins here.January 28 Incident (Battle of Shanghai, 1932)1932.01Less than half a year after the Northeast had been lost, Japanese forces again made trouble in Shanghai; the Nineteenth Route Army met them where they came, the Fifth Army arrived to fight beside it, and thirty-four days turned into a grinding seesaw - ending with a ceasefire agreement that tied the hands of Chinese troops in Shanghai and laid the unfavorable ground for the Battle of Shanghai (1937) five years later.Defense of the Great Wall (1933)1933.01In the first five months of 1933, from Yuguan to Rehe and then to the passes of the Great Wall, Chinese forces fought a series of localized resistances against Japanese forces -- the blood shed at several passes was finally let away by a single Tanggu Truce.Chahar Resistance (1933)1933.05In the summer of 1933, Feng Yuxiang, Ji Hongchang, and Fang Zhenwu raised an allied army at Zhangjiakou and recovered Duolun - the first recovery of lost territory by Chinese troops since the Mukden Incident; afterward, this army was deprived of pay, pressured, and dissolved by its own government.Suiyuan Resistance (1936)1936.11In the winter of 1936, Japan pushed puppet Mongol forces westward against Suiyuan; Fu Zuoyi's troops first held the front at Hongge'ertu, then in a snowy night raid struck Bailingmiao and took the enemy's lair -- a rare clean victory since the Mukden Incident; one month later came the Xi'an Incident.Beiping–Tianjin Operation1937.07In July 1937, from one night of gunfire at Marco Polo Bridge to the abandonment of Beiping, only twenty-two days passed -- the full-scale War of Resistance opened with a hurried and confused loss, while the three words "Marco Polo Bridge" became the call that mobilized an entire nation.Battle of Shanghai (1937)1937.08China fed its fighting units into Shanghai batch after batch - 700,000 against 300,000, 3 months, more than 250,000 casualties - and did not hold the city, but held two larger things: Japan's timetable for "settling China in 3 months" was made void, and the provincial armies that had once been a loose plate of sand bled for the first time in the same trench.Air War and the Navy (1937–45, combined account)1937.08The Chinese navy began its war of resistance by sinking more than forty of its own vessels; the Chinese air force carried eight years of lost air superiority on the lives of a generation of pilots. This article records what happened in the sky and on the river: the curve by which air superiority was lost in full and then taken back, and the Chinese, Soviet, and American pilots who died for that curve.Battles of Baoshan and Luodian1937.09.01At Baoshan, six hundred men held a small city for three days; the whole battalion died there, and even the opposing side's battle reports recorded the name of battalion commander Yao Ziqing. At Luodian, a town of only a few streets changed hands more than ten times, with both sides feeding in thousands of lives each day - the four words "mill of flesh and blood" were first called out from here.Battle of Taiyuan (1937)1937.09.11The largest campaign in North China: Yan Xishan's Jin-Sui Army, the Central Army moving south, and the Eighth Route Army, only recently reorganized, fought on the same map in Shanxi as three separate systems; at the front, Xinkou held for more than twenty days and did not let the Japanese forces through, but once Niangzi Pass broke on the flank, the whole line collapsed, and Taiyuan fell on 11.9. Before the smoke of the frontal campaign had cleared, the Eighth Route Army's three divisions had already remained in the mountains of Shanxi: the end of this battle was the opening of the battlefields behind enemy lines.Battle of Pingxingguan1937.09.25The Eighth Route Army's first battle after taking the field: the 115th Division laid an ambush in the ravine of Qiaogou at Pingxingguan, trapped more than a thousand men of the Itagaki Division's baggage train and motor convoy, and suffered more than six hundred casualties of its own; the battle was not large, but its echo was enormous -- on this day, the myth that the "Imperial Army could not be defeated" publicly collapsed for the first time, and that asymmetry itself is something this archive has to record.Battles of Xinkou and Niangzi Pass (1937)1937.10.13For more than twenty days at Xinkou, 80,000 defenders held the Itagaki Division on the front and did not yield a step -- the hardest positional battle fought by Chinese forces on the North China front; once Niangzi Pass on the eastern line fell, even the best defense at Xinkou had to withdraw -- **"Xinkou was not defeated; the defeat came at Niangzi Pass"**: the front held, the flank collapsed, and Taiyuan's fate was not decided before the Xinkou line.Night Raid on Yangmingbao1937.10.19When the Xinkou front was being pinned down by Japanese aircraft, a regiment of the Eighth Route Army slipped into Yangmingbao airfield in Daixian and burned more than twenty aircraft in a single night -- infantry took out an airfield, at the cost of one regimental commander and several dozen soldiers.Defense of Sihang Warehouse1937.10.26Four hundred and eleven men held one warehouse for six days, while announcing eight hundred to the outside world -- across the Suzhou Creek, a million citizens in the concessions and reporters from around the world watched from the opposite bank. This was a battle consciously fought for the world to see; the soldiers on the stage, however, were truly dying. After the play ended, they were imprisoned for four years, and their regimental commander died under the knives of his own men.Battlefields Behind Enemy Lines (1937–45)1937.11After Taiyuan fell, the Eighth Route Army's three divisions broke themselves into smaller formations and slipped behind the Japanese occupation zones, using eight years to turn the "occupied areas" into a net the enemy could not chew through: this line had no grand campaign, only tens of thousands of small engagements, five "public-order strengthening" campaigns, countless villages burned down, and base areas with a population of one hundred million.Defense of Nanjing (※ Nanjing Massacre)1937.12Before the routed forces from Shanghai had even been gathered in, the defense of the capital had begun - it held for 8 days; the order to withdraw came in haste, and there were no boats by the river; in the 6 weeks after the city fell, the deaths of 300,000 people turned the word "Nanjing" from the name of a city into a wound known across the world.Battle of Xuzhou (1938)1938.01A group of "miscellaneous armies" long looked down on by the central authorities - Sichuan troops, Guangxi troops, Northwestern Army units, and Northeastern Army units - were braided into a single cord in Li Zongren's hands: 600,000 against 240,000, at Xuzhou, the junction of the Jinpu Railway, they won the first major victory of the full-scale War of Resistance; at the end, another 600,000 men broke out of the encirclement in organized formations, turning a defeated withdrawal into a "victorious retreat." The two words "miscellaneous armies" were washed clean by blood in this battle.Bombing of Chongqing ※1938.02From 1938 to 1943, Japanese forces carried out five years of strategic bombing against Chongqing and cities in the rear area, launching more than 200 air raids on Chongqing and dropping more than 20,000 bombs -- the first Chinese city subjected to long-term indiscriminate bombing, where "indiscriminate bombing" as a form of atrocity is written down explicitly.Defense of Tengxian1938.03.14One Sichuan force, the worst equipped and wanted by no one - the roughly three thousand men of the 122nd Division holding the city - held Isogai's Tenth Division at Tengxian for three days; divisional commander Wang Mingzhang died with the city, the division was fought out, and time was bought for the defense of Tai'erzhuang.Ambushes at Shentouling and Xiangtangpu (1938)1938.03.16Two textbook ambushes in a single month: at Shentouling, troops spent the night tucked against the road on a bare ridge deemed "unsuitable for ambush"; at Xiangtangpu, 180 Japanese motor vehicles were burned in half a day. Liu Bocheng's method of "drawing out enemy relief forces and striking them" became, from then on, a standard grammar of warfare behind enemy lines.Battle of Tai'erzhuang1938.03.23Sun Lianzhong's old Northwestern Army troops held house by house for two weeks in a walled town beside the canal, while Tang Enbo's corps looped back along the outer line and attacked from inside and outside, driving back the Seya Detachment of Isogai's Tenth Division - the first major victory on the frontal battlefield since the full-scale War of Resistance began, and the country went almost mad with joy.Battle of Lanfeng and the Huayuankou Breach (1938) ※1938.05After the breakout from Xuzhou, one Japanese division drove alone to the gates of Zhengzhou; more than ten Chinese divisions closed in but failed to destroy it, two army commanders abandoned cities in the face of battle, and one division commander was shot. The encirclement collapsed, and in the end Japanese forces were stopped by blowing open China's own Yellow River dike: 890,000 people (the postwar official basis) died in the yellow flood and the famine and epidemics that followed, and forty-four counties across Henan, Anhui, and Jiangsu were left as barren ground for ten years. This was the largest single case in the War of Resistance of "one's own people against one's own people."Battle of Wuhan (1938)1938.06One hundred and ten divisions arrayed themselves along both banks of the Yangtze and below the Dabie Mountains, holding against 250,000 Japanese forces advancing upstream - after four and a half months, Wuhan was still abandoned in the end, but the city was handed over intact, and the people withdrew singing; from this battle onward, Japan's four words "quick battle, quick decision" were made void, and the war was dragged into the stalemate it feared most.Zhanggufeng and Nomonhan [foreign wars on Chinese soil]1938.07At Zhanggufeng near the mouth of the Tumen River in 1938, and at Nomonhan on the Khalkha River in 1939, Japan and the Soviet Union fought two battles on the borderlands of China's Northeast - the ground lay on China's sovereign map, China was wholly absent; and the guns of Nomonhan changed the direction of the Pacific War, while also indirectly determining the later shape of the China theater.Battle of Wanjialing (1938)1938.09A Japanese division drove alone into the mountains of northern Jiangxi, was surrounded on all sides by Xue Yue's more than 100,000 men and fought there for more than ten days; even officers airdropped in to take over command could not break it out -- in the Fourteen-Year War of Resistance, this was the only battle that came **close** to annihilating an entire Japanese division.Battle of Nanchang (1939)1939.03The first major battle at the opening of the stalemate phase: Japanese forces used gas shells to cover a forced crossing of the Xiu River and opened the road with massed tanks, taking Nanchang in ten days; the Chinese side then counterattacked for more than a month, entered the city's outskirts, and fell short at the last step, while Chen Anbao, commander of the 29th Army, was killed in action.Battle of Suizhou–Zaoyang1939.05The Japanese Eleventh Army swept northern Hubei in an attempt to catch the main force of the Fifth War Area; Li Zongren avoided the strong points and struck the weak, while Zhang Zizhong led the right-wing corps east across the Xiang River for a flank attack; once Japanese forces had routed the opposition, they withdrew. The standard form of a stalemate-phase campaign appeared here in full for the first time: the Chinese side called it the "Great Victory of Suizhou–Zaoyang," the Japanese side called it "completion of the operational objective," and both sides won.First Battle of Changsha (1939)1939.09Roughly 100,000 Japanese troops drove on Changsha along three routes; Xue Yue used the Xinqiang River-Miluo River-Laodao River water lines for successive resistance, destroyed roads, and stripped the countryside of usable supplies. Japanese forces reached Changsha's outskirts but could neither take the city nor hold their position, and withdrew on their own: the Chinese side proclaimed the "Great Victory of Northern Hunan," the Japanese side called it "completion of the objective," and another campaign was won by both sides. This was the beginning of Changsha's three defenses.Battle of Huangtuling1939.11.03A mortar shell landed in an isolated courtyard in a Taihang Mountain gully and killed Lieutenant General Abe Norihide, the Japanese forces' "flower of famous generals" -- the highest-ranking Japanese commander killed by the Eighth Route Army; Tokyo radio mourned him, and only later did the squad leader firing the gun in the Taihang Mountains learn whom he had hit.Battle of Southern Guangxi and Kunlun Pass1939.11.15Japanese forces landed at Qinzhou Bay and drove straight toward Nanning, aiming to sever the Guangxi-Vietnam international transport line; Du Yuming's Fifth Army, China's only mechanized army, forced three assaults to take Kunlun Pass, killed the enemy brigade commander Nakamura Masao, and won a costly victory; but after the turn of the year came the defeat at Binyang, Kunlun Pass was won and then lost again, and the overall campaign was still lost: local triumph, overall failure.Winter Offensive1939.12In the winter of 1939, more than one hundred divisions across the frontal battlefield threw themselves at Japanese strongpoints at the same time, from Suiyuan to southern Guangxi. This was the only active full-front general offensive by Chinese forces in the Fourteen-Year War of Resistance, and it was also a general measurement of the frontal battlefield's offensive capacity: it measured that the will to fight was still there, and also measured the ceiling imposed by assault firepower.Battle of Zaoyang–Yichang1940.05The Japanese Eleventh Army struck northern Hubei again and took Yichang for the first time: an army-group commander-in-chief died on the firing line he had requested, and the gateway by which the Yangtze entered Sichuan was lost. The general's death and the gateway's loss belonged to the same campaign.Hundred Regiments Offensive1940.08One hundred and five regiments tore up North China's railways in the same night: the largest active offensive on the battlefields behind enemy lines, with brilliant results and a heavy price; for the next forty years, this battle fought another, longer battle of its own: from achievement to charge to rehabilitation, the political life of one engagement lasted longer than its military history.Counter-"Mopping-Up" Operations (1941–42, incl. ※ the "Three Alls")1941.01After the Hundred Regiments Offensive, Japanese forces changed the object of war in North China from armies to society itself -- "Three Alls" mopping-up, no man's zones, and the tightening of the "cage" cut the base areas' population and territory by nearly half in two years; counter-"mopping-up" was not one battle, but the way the entire military and civilian population of the base areas survived under strangulation.Battle of Shanggao1941.03A rare clean victory on the frontal battlefield during the stalemate phase: Luo Zhuoying's 19th Group Army, centered on Wang Yaowu's 74th Corps, prepared a pocket in advance and encircled the overextended 34th Division of the Japanese forces on both banks of the Jinjiang around Shanggao in northern Jiangxi. It badly mauled the division; although it did not annihilate it in a single encirclement, the Chinese side held the battlefield initiative throughout.Battle of the Zhongtiao Mountains1941.05One hundred eighty thousand men had held a "great fortress behind enemy lines in North China" for three years; once Japanese forces closed the ring from all sides, it evaporated in little more than ten days -- not defeated by enemy strength, but by its own inner decay, where the systemic illness of the frontal battlefield rotted into its most complete specimen.Second Battle of Changsha (1941)1941.09In the autumn of 1941, the Japanese Eleventh Army, roughly 100,000 strong, attacked Changsha again. Because the Ninth War Area's command communications had been decrypted and its armies were committed one after another only to be defeated in detail, Changsha fell for several days; afterward, both sides nevertheless declared "victory": the Chinese side called it the "Second Great Victory of Changsha," while the Japanese side called it the "completion of the objective of Operation Ka."Third Battle of Changsha (1941–42)1941.12After the outbreak of the Pacific War, Japanese forces attacked Changsha for a third time in support of the Hong Kong operation; Xue Yue used the "Heavenly Furnace tactics" to lure the enemy into stalling below the city walls and then encircle it from all sides, and Japanese forces retreated in collapse after exhausting their ammunition and food--amid the Allies' line-wide defeats after Pearl Harbor, Changsha was the first victory.Yunnan–Burma Theater (1942–45)1942.02To preserve the last international transfusion line, one hundred thousand Chinese troops went abroad to fight for the first time: the opening campaign collapsed, and tens of thousands died in the rain forests of the Savage Mountains; two years later they returned, exchanging bodies for feet of ground at Songshan and Tengchong, and reopened the road. This was the only overseas theater of the War of Resistance, and the first counteroffensive Chinese troops won as an Allied army.Defense of Toungoo1942.03The first battle fought by Chinese troops after crossing the national border: in a small city on the Burmese plain, the nine thousand men of the 200th Division held off a Japanese division for twelve days, covered the British withdrawal and the deployment of the main force, and then withdrew as an intact formation on the eve before the encirclement closed. The first battle already demonstrated that this army could fight with method on foreign ground.Battle of Yenangyaung1942.04One regiment of Chinese soldiers brought more than seven thousand British troops, with their vehicles, out of encirclement in the Burmese oilfields -- the first successful rescue of Allied forces by Chinese troops beyond China's borders. Among the British who were saved, some remembered it for the rest of their lives; in the official histories, the scale of this battle has been argued over on both sides for decades.Retreat Through the Savage Mountains (※)1942.05.01Once Lashio was lost, the road home for the one hundred thousand men of the Expeditionary Force was gone: tens of thousands under Du Yuming's command were ordered to cross the primeval rain forest of the Hukawng Valley and return to China, and in the rainy season, among leeches, miasma, and hunger, more men died in the forest over two or three months than were killed in the whole Burma campaign. This was the quietest and most grievous passage on Whence We Came: the enemy scarcely fired a shot.Battle of Zhejiang–Jiangxi (1942)1942.05.15After the B-25 crews from the Doolittle Raid crash-landed in Zhejiang and were rescued by Chinese civilians, Japanese forces launched the Zhejiang–Jiangxi operation: they took out airfields, struck the Zhejiang–Jiangxi railway, and, during their withdrawal, released biological weapons and carried out retaliatory village massacres along the line; the bill for bombing Tokyo was sent to Zhejiang's civilians.Siege of Qinyuan1942.11Japanese forces occupied Qinyuan county seat, and all 80,000 people in the county, under Party organization, collectively emptied it out: for two and a half years, the occupying forces held an empty city with no people, no grain, and no secure water supply, until in the end they withdrew on their own. A battle won without fighting a major battle: the most complete demonstration of the four words "people's war."Battle of Western Hubei1943.05In the early summer of 1943, the Japanese Eleventh Army drove west into the Qingjiang River basin and reached Shipai Fortress at the mouth of the Three Gorges, the last river-defense gate shielding Chongqing; Hu Lien's Eleventh Division held Shipai, and after the Japanese offensive stalled, the whole line withdrew. The Chinese side called it the "Great Victory of Western Hubei"; the Japanese side recorded it as a turn back after objectives had been achieved -- two ways of remembering the same battle remain side by side.North Burma Counteroffensive (incl. Myitkyina)1943.10The defeated soldiers who had crawled out of the Savage Mountains two years earlier changed into U.S. equipment, trained for a year and a half, and fought their way back along the river valleys where their comrades had been buried -- Hukawng, Mogaung, Myitkyina: for the first time, the Chinese Army in India pressed Japanese forces down with firepower. Revenge starting from a place of burial became a textbook case.Battle of Changde1943.11Eight thousand "Huben" troops held for sixteen days in a city bombed flat and burned out; when the city fell, only a little more than two hundred remained — and the division commander who broke out alive was sent to a military court after he returned.Battle of Cheqiao1944.03In spring 1944, the New Fourth Army's First Division assaulted the fortified town of Cheqiao and then struck relief forces in succession, capturing 24 Japanese soldiers in a single action -- the highest number of Japanese forces taken alive in any one engagement behind enemy lines; behind the lines in Central China, the war moved from enduring to striking, and the spring of counteroffensive began in this waterside market town in northern Jiangsu.Battle of Henan–Hunan–Guangxi (Japanese "Operation Ichi-Go")1944.04The largest offensive in the history of the Japanese Army, and the largest collapse on China's frontal battlefield since 1938: in the year when the whole world was counterattacking, China was retreating in great strides.Battle of Central Henan (1944)1944.04.17Henan was lost in thirty-seven days -- in some places, civilians did not help the Nationalist Army, but instead took guns from routed soldiers. The account of popular allegiance had already filled up before the military collapse arrived.Battle of Tengchong1944.05.11After crossing the four-thousand-meter Gaoligong Mountains, the 20th Group Army reduced Tengchong city to scorched ground cleared house by house -- forty-two days of street fighting, the defending force annihilated, and the first walled county seat China recovered was a city with scarcely a few intact houses left. Three months after the city was recovered, the National Martyrs Cemetery had already risen: the first cemetery for fallen soldiers that Chinese people built for this war.Fourth Battle of Changsha (1944)1944.05.27The same city, the same war-area commander, the same "Heavenly Furnace" - the first three times forged a myth; the fourth burned the city into it.Battle of Songshan1944.06.04A mountain on the west bank of the Nu River; an underground fortress Japanese forces had spent two years building; one thousand three hundred defenders. The Chinese Expeditionary Force fought for ninety-five days and suffered 7,700 casualties, and in the end used three tons of explosives to blow the main peak, men and works together, into the sky -- ten battles for Songshan, and the defenders wiped out to the last. For the first time, Chinese troops reduced a Japanese strongpoint to "gyokusai"; for the first time, too, they learned what it meant to buy meters with lives in a fortified assault.Battle of Longling1944.06.05The longest battle of the western Yunnan counteroffensive -- five months, three entries and three withdrawals. Longling was the crossroads between Songshan and Tengchong; Japanese reinforcements came up wave after wave from Mangshi, while the Expeditionary Force entered the city again and again only to be pushed out again. Only after Songshan was opened and Tengchong fell did Longling finally change hands. The campaign's outcome was ultimately decided by two other mountains.Defense of Hengyang1944.06.23A depleted remnant force of 17,000 men, still unreplenished, held off five Japanese divisions in succession for 47 days inside a city emptied by evacuation - the longest urban defensive battle on the Chinese battlefield.Battle of Guilin–Liuzhou1944.08The final leg of Operation Ichi-Go: Guilin and Liuzhou fell on the same day, Japanese forces once drove as far as Dushan in Guizhou, only a few hundred kilometers from Chongqing; the transport corridor had been "opened," but the war was already nearly lost.Battle of Western Hunan (Xuefeng Mountains)1945.04In the spring and summer of 1945, the Japanese forces' last large-scale offensive drove toward Zhijiang airfield; in the Xuefeng Mountains, Chinese forces held them point by point, encircled them, and drove them back -- the frontal battlefield's last major campaign closed in complete victory.[Foreign war on Chinese soil] Soviet August Storm Offensive (1945)1945.08Three days after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, 1.5 million Soviet troops poured into China's Northeast from three directions and crushed the Kwantung Army in little more than ten days -- the last great battle between foreign powers fought on Chinese soil. It ended fourteen years of occupation, and also emptied the Northeast's factories and decided the first chessboard of the civil war. Liberation and new trouble came from the same army.

Sources and Open Questions

Main sources: *Operational History of the Front-Line Battlefield in China's War of Resistance Against Japan* (edited by Guo Rugui and Huang Yuzhang); *History of the Chinese People's War of Resistance Against Japan* (Academy of Military Sciences); the relevant volumes of the Japanese Defense Agency War History Office's *Senshi Sosho*; Rana Mitter, *China's War with Japan, 1937–1945: The Struggle for Survival*; Hans van de Ven, *China at War: Triumph and Tragedy in the Emergence of the New China*; Documentation Platform for the War of Resistance Against Japan and Modern Sino-Japanese Relations (modernhistory.org.cn, the first entry point for this project); JACAR Japanese archives.

Open questions: statistical bases for conscript recruitment and peak troop strength; the composition basis for the 35 million casualties; basis for property-loss figures; the boundaries of the two bases for Japanese losses in China; amounts of Soviet aid and Lend-Lease; documents for the "fourteen-year" counting method; population figures for each atrocity node (to be summarized after the separate articles); the source and wording of the "non-resistance" order; telegrams and documents on the strategic intent of opening the Shanghai battlefield on August 13; original text of Konoe's statement that Japan would "no longer deal with the National Government"; terms of the Trautmann mediation and the course of Chongqing's refusal; resolution text of the Luochuan Conference; schedule and resolution texts of the 1937 Nanjing National Defense Conference; prewar Chinese assessment documents comparing Chinese and Japanese strength; membership and activities of the "Low-Key Club"; materials on Ishiwara Kanji's "non-expansion" argument and military debates.