Front battlefield

The so-called front battlefield refers to the battlefield where Chinese armies engaged Japanese armies in the advance line of Japanese aggression against China. It is mainly located near the large- and medium-sized cities, on both sides of traffic lines, and in other strategic locations where China and Japan face military confrontation. As the Chinese army fighting in this battlefield is mainly the KMT’s army, it is said to be the KMT’s front battlefield.

After the founding of New China, and for quite a long period of time, in stark contrast to the fact that the Chinese Kuomintang (KMT) authorities in Taiwan belittled the role of the Communist Party in the war of resistance,

War of Resistance against Japanese aggression 147 the mainland emphasized that the Communist Party was the leader of the Chinese Anti-Japanese War, and at the same time it hold an understated attitude toward the history of the Kuomintang troops’ combat against Japan.

After the 1980s, research on the front battlefield began to heat up. First came the publication of historical materials. The documentary sources include The Diary of the Kuomintang Military Secret Warfare during the War of Resistance Against Japanese Aggression (Archives Press, 1995) edited by the Second Historical Archives of China and The Front Battlefield of the AntiJapanese War (Phoenix Press, 2005) which is expanded and re-edited, etc. The special historical materials include The Marco Polo Bridge Incident and the Beiping-Tianjin Anti-Japanese Campaign (printed in 1985) edited by the Party History Teaching and Research Section of the Central Party School of the Communist Party of China, The Selected Works of the August Thirteen Anti-Japanese Historical Materials (Shanghai People’s Publishing House, 1986) edited by the Institute of History of the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences, and The Selected Works of Wuhan Anti-Japanese War Materials (printed in 1985) edited by Wuhan University Archives, etc. The oral historical materials include The Persona! Experiences of the Original Kuomintang Generals in the Anti-Japanese War edited by the Literature and History Data Editing Committee of the CPPCC.

The well-rounded works on the front battlefield mainly include Guo Xiong’s Introduction to the Important Battle of the KMT’s Front Battlefield during the War of Resistance Against Japan (Sichuan People’s Publishing House, 1985, reprinted in 2005), Ma Zhen-du’s The Splendour of Blood Dying - the Realistic Writing of the Front Battlefield in Anti-Japanese War (Guangxi Normal University Press, 1993) and so on. Regarding the specific case study of the campaign, there are books like Great Victory-Taierzhuang Battle Record (Cm Zhi-bo & Zhao Guo-zhang), Wonders of Soldiers and Fire-Wuhan Defence War (Ao Wenwei), Iron and Blood Expedition-Chinese Expeditionary Army Fighting the Japanese in India and Myanmar (Tian Xuan) published successively by Guangxi Normal University Publishing House after 1996. There is also Luo Yu-ming’s Hunan Battlefield during the War of Resistance Against Japan (Xuelin Publishing House, 2002).

The study of the front battlefield mainly focuses on the following issues:

First, whether the National Government had strategic preparations for resisting the Japanese before the outbreak of the comprehensive war of resistance. Before the 1980s, it was agreed that the National Government did not have any strategic preparations. Later, opinions are divided. Some believe that the Kuomintang had already begun preparations for the anti-Japanese activities shortly after the September 18th Incident, such as dividing the national defense zones, formulating and implementing the national defense construction plan, establishing the National Defense Design Committee, and conducting investigation on military strength, strategy resources, military production, transportation, logistics and seeking solutions, etc.³⁴ Huang Dao-xuan (2000)³⁵ believed that behind Chiang Kai-shek’s proposed policy there were complications in which while such a policy “was against the will of the general public for its passive resistance, it was almost a last resort under the circumstances at the time and on the basis of weighing against the overall national power; and there were also mixed motivations in which Chiang Kai-shek and Kuomingtang's urgent demand for internal suppression of communists by force was interfused with a determination to resist at the last moment. It was a helpless choice made by the Kuomintang and Chiang Kai-shek to deal with the situation at the time under the domestic and foreign difficulties”. Yang Tian-shi (2001)³⁶ proposed that the “suppressing the Communists” war carried out by Chiang Kai-shek at that time is a measure taken as a cover of anti-Japanese in the process of “governing the southwest base area” for “preparing for the war of resistance”.

The second is about the Kuomintang’s strategic approach. Most of people believe that the Kuomintang’s strategic policy was “a long-lasting war of attrition”, and its basic content was “to exchange space for time and accumulate small victories into larger ones”. Regarding the similarities and differences between the Kuomintang’s “long-lasting war of attrition” and the Communist Party’s “protracted war”, people who think they are different emphasize the essential difference, that is, the “lasting war of attrition” is a negative strategy; while people who think they are the same emphasize that they “have no fundamental difference in principle”, and it is the basis of military cooperation for the KMT and the CPC.³⁷

The third is whether the Kuomintang has carried out guerrilla warfare in the enemy’s rear area. Most believe the Kuomintang had carried out guerrilla warfare. For example, Qi Hou-jie (1990)³⁸ believes that at the end of 1938, the Kuomintang had proposed the issue of “turning] the frontal defensive warfare into guerrilla warfare in the enemy’s rear area” at the Nanyue military conference. Some people also studied the implementation of the Kuomintang guerrilla warfare in the enemy’s rear area. For example, Luo Yu-ming believes that “the total amount of Kuomintang’s troops carrying out guerrilla warfare in the enemy’s rear is about more than 500,000. The guerrilla-formed regular army established base areas in the enemy’s rear area and cooperated with the Kuomintang in frontal battlefields, which pinned down a large number of Japanese troops and greatly threatened the Japanese rear base and supply lines”.³⁹ The opposite opinion holds that in the early days of the AntiJapanese War, the Kuomintang did not plan to deploy guerrilla warfare in the enemy’s rear area. A few troops carrying out guerrilla warfare in the enemy’s rear area was the result of cooperation with the Communist Party against the orders of Chiang Kai-shek. These troops later all participated in the Eighth Route Army; after the fall of Wuhan, though the Kuomintang established the Hebei-Chahar war zone and the Jiangsu-Shandong war zone and began to attach importance to the guerrilla warfare in the enemy’s rear area, its main purpose was to gain the regular army operations support and cooperation from the guerrilla warfare, and to limit and undermine the development of the Communist Party’s base areas in the enemy’s rear area. Therefore, the

Kuomintang cannot be considered to have a guerrilla battlefield in the enemy’s rear area.⁴⁰ There are also some people who compared the guerrilla warfare between the Kuomintang and the Communist Party and then proposed that during the period of the full-scale anti-Japanese war, both the Kuomintang and the Communist Party tried and worked hard on the issue of guerrilla warfare. The Kuomintang’s guerrilla warfare in the enemy’s rear area is mainly an auxiliary warfare to cooperate with the frontal battlefield operations. The guerrilla warfare of the Communist Party has independent strategic significance and value. Due to the rigid warfare methods, coupled with the lack of support and cooperation from the broad masses of people, the Kuomintang’s guerrillas found it difficult to combat the Japanese army for a long time, but were also unable to compete with the Communist Party’s armed forced in the enemy’s rear area.⁴¹

The fourth is when the frontal battlefield began a passive war of resistance. After the 1980s, some people proposed that the period of time from November 1938 to the summer of 1940 was the stage of the transition from strategic defense to strategic confrontation in the Chinese anti-Japanese battlefield. The Japanese military’s offensive focus remained on the frontal battlefield, and the Kuomintang had not yet passively resisted the war. But after the outbreak of the Pacific War in 1941, the Kuomintang completely pinned its hopes for victory on the US-British allied forces and began a passive war of resistance.⁴² It has also been suggested that the Kuomintang’s negative resistance did not begin after the fall of Guangzhou and Wuhan, nor the outbreak of the Pacific War, but after the failure of the winter offensive in the frontal battlefield in 1940.⁴³

The fifth is the case study of battles in frontal battlefields. Regarding the attitude of the National Government in the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, some people think that it didn’t mean to engage in war. The underlying reason is that it feared that making war against Japan would weaken its military power and provide opportunities for the Soviet Union and the CCP. Therefore, “Chiang Kai-shek pretended to fight while trying to avoid war after the Marco Polo Bridge Incident”.⁴⁴ Regarding the relationship between the strategic intentions of the National Government and the Battle of Shanghai, it was suggested that the Battle of Shanghai had been planned in advance by the National Government, and it intended to lead the Japanese force to change its main attack direction from North China to East China, and afterward, Japanese began to attack the Chinese army from the east to the west along the Yangtze River, thus smashing the attempt of the Japanese to suppress the Chinese army to the east of the Pinghan line and conquer it. The realization of this strategic intention is of great significance to China’s war of resistance.⁴⁵ There are other people who disagreed with this view, saying that not only did the National Government not have the strategy to actively induce the Japanese military to change the attack direction, but the results of the battle did not change the Japanese offensive direction.⁴⁶ There are still people who believe that the Battle of Shanghai was a preemptive military strike to prevent the Japanese from going south along the Ping-Han line to Wuhan, with the intention of changing the offensive direction of the Japanese.⁴⁷

Regarding the Battle of Wuhan, some people compared the plan of China and Japan and concluded that: “Compared with the two sides, China’s combat guidance is successful, while that of the Japanese army is a failure”.⁴⁸ On the operation of the Chinese Expeditionary Forces, Huang Dao-xuan (2001)⁴⁹ clearly pointed out that Stilwell should bear the main responsibility for the failure in the Burma campaign for his reckless offensive without taking the actual situation of the battlefield into consideration. Chiang Kai-shek should also bear some responsibilities for making a compromise with Stilwell during the middle and late period of the campaign, for fear of offending the United States. Regarding the Battle of Hunan, Wang Qi-sheng (2004)⁵⁰ believed it was the longest battle in the “No. 1 Combat” in 1944 and the National Revolutionary Army resisted the most tenaciously. However, due to the fact that the National Government’s military commanding department’s judgment on the enemy’s situation and its deployment were obviously flawed, the troops were not well-adjusted, the coordination ability was poor, and the military’s combat effectiveness was weak, they didn’t win at last.