Session 11: The Japanese Ichigo Campaign and the Chinese Response, 1944

An important contribution of the conference to our understanding of the Second World War in East Asia was to highlight the significance of the Ichigo Campaign. The campaign, usually summarized in a couple of pages at the end of most studies of the war when scholarly energies have been exhausted, was the largest single operation that the Japanese army ever attempted. By eliminating the Nationalists from all of northern China and much of southern China, it virtually ended the fighting capacity of the already badly exhausted Nationalist forces and drove the Nationalists from their last remaining resource areas outside Sichuan. It also provided new opportunities for Communist expansion. Taking place at a time of grave shortages and famine, the campaign was one of the bitterest of the entire war.

Two excellent papers were presented in this session on the Japanese Ichigo Offensive of 1944. Collectively, the two papers, by Professor HARA Takeshi (National Academy of Social Sciences, Institute of Modern History , Beijing ) were a model of clarity and complementarity for the conference.

In his analysis of the Ichigo campaign Professor Hara noted that the Japanese offensive, like many of the army's operations in China , the offensive was very successful at the tactical and operational levels, but was a strategic disaster. On the other hand, Professor Wang argued that it was equally disastrous for the Chiang Kai-shek, who spent far too much blood and treasure trying to resist the Japanese onslaught.

Professor Hara pointed out that the Ichigo Offensive was conceived by planners in the China theatre, though its feasibility doubted by the Army General Staff. Yet it was set in motion nonetheless. The two main objectives of the offensive were to 1) to destroy American airbases in China , and 2) to secure a supply corridor from Indo-China into China in order to prepare for Japan 's climactic battle with the United States . The former objective was modestly successful, but considering the nature of the topography involved, the latter was not even realistic. Successfully maintaining such a corridor was all the less likely, moreover, because of the greatly diminished capacity of the Japanese ground forces in China . which, by 1944, could take ground but could not hold it. Thus, Japan 's last and greatest land campaign was both futile and devastatingly counter-productive.

In his treatment of planning for the offensive, Professor Hara offered a detailed exploration of the Army General Staff and, in doing so, raised several questions about command and control systems in the Japanese army, about the role of the emperor, and about the autonomy of Japanese field armies and officers in the China theatre. That Ichigo took place at roughly the same time as the army's Imphal offensive, as well as simultaneous operations in the Philippines , is perhaps indicative of larger pathologies in Japanese decision-making late in the war.

As misguided as the Japanese army may have been in planning the Ichigo offensive, the operational success it enjoyed was largely enabled by exhaustion on the Chinese side, which had to invest its scarce remaining resources to the Allied campaign in Burma . Professor Wang's paper highlighted the problems of inadequate intelligence, the flawed command and control systems, and the poor decision making that plagued Chinese armies this late in the war. In the discussions that followed, intelligence gathering and processing was a subject of great interest to the participants, specifically the problem of acquiring adequate strategic intelligence during this conflict.

In his assessment of the Nationalist response to the Japanes Ichigo offensive, Professor Wang asserted that the Nationalist regime both underestimated the quality of the Japanese forces before them and over-committed high value assets to the defense of strategically insignificant positions. Basically, Chiang Kai-shek misjudged the appropriate time for a counter-attack and thus set his cause back greatly. Mao Zedong, on the other hand, estimated that late 1945, or even 1946, would be the time to go on the offensive against the Japanese. In the event, of course, Chiang was a year too soon and Mao a year too late. These decisions undoubtedly had a significant influence on the outcome of the subsequent civil war in China .