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Modern Warfare: The Rush to Beijing & the Shanghai Disaster
Part One of
]The Great Sino-Japanese War for East Asian Hegemony

A Victoria 2 Japanese continuation game from Europa Universalis III

>> Click Here for the "Ethiopian Campaign!" <<
>> Click Here for the "European Expedition!" <<
>> Click Here for the "Sino-Japanese War!" (Part 2) <<
>> Click Here for "For Liberty!" (Part 1) <<
>> Click Here for "For Liberty!" (Part 2) <<


Click for a larger image, because the original is too large to use here on its own.
I failed to take screenshots despite knowing I would post this. Sorry.
Depicted above is the situation of the war at the time of the Japanese invasion of Shanghai.

Interbellum
Despite convincing victories in previous wars, and coming out of war with France relatively unscathed, the Japanese military establishment was under no illusions as to the dangers facing their country should they see a war with a fully modernized China. Even before French advisors were planted within the Qing imperial court, Japanese forces were barely capable of holding themselves against the overwhelming numerical superiority of the Chinese armies. Now, with western industrial know-how spreading like wildfire across the recently modernized continental power, the Japanese establishment knew it was only a matter of years before the sleeping dragon in the land where the sun sets would awaken from the drumming of industrial machinery.

"Within a decade," newly-minted War Minister and Field Marshal Uehara Gentaro is credited as saying (though the sentiment existed for years before him), "China shall become more than a mighty equal, and my sons and daughters shall be made to pay their war-debts should we fail to strike forth now and defend the future of our nation."

For two and a half years, the lessons of past wars were used to prepare for the grim, inevitable conflict on the Asian mainland, but this time Japan would make use of the great equalizer of modern war: the machine gun. Already used to great effect in the Franco-Japanese War, adoption of this new engine of death quickly became a priority for the Imperial Japanese Army. New tactics of warfare were drawn up from past experiences and this new technology, while the contiental armies were expanded their orders of battle updated to accomodate the new tactics. National stockpiles were stored for the coming isolation and new, modern steel warships laid down in anticipation of the need to both blockade the expansive Chinese coast and prevent reinforcement from France. Training of reserve forces - levies drawn from the poor labor and farming classes - to bolster the regular forces began in earnest in the Fall of 1880, while regular troops were moved into position in Mongolia & Manchuria, all under the "official" guise of "restructuring the Army's command structure."

Most importantly, Uehara Gentaro used insights gained from his time in Turkey and his observations of the effectiveness of emerging war technologies to institute the doctrine of defensive warfare, to veritably "bleed the Qing armies white" as a means of overcoming the vast numerical superiority of the Chinese; never before had such a brutal ideology been used in warfare on such a large scale, which flew in the face of traditional war strategy heavily influenced by the "conquer swiftly" mentality eschewed by Sun Tzu & the "Art of War," and drew many skeptics from amongst Japan's military elite, many of whom believed a swift victory could be achieved through a simple push to Beijing & a few startegic victories on the field.

But this was modern war, a war of calcuated, callous disregard for human life, and Field Marshal Uehara's plan was approved - with great reservation - by the Emperor. War was formally declared in the twilight hours of Januray 1st, 1881, and Japanese soldiers crossed from the hills of Manchuria across the Chinese border even as New Years' celebrations were just commencing in Europe.


The Rush to Beijing
The battle plan was simple: sweep the Gansu region to consolidate the long Mongolian front line, use a skeleton army to move through Japan's Shan State puppet into Yunnan and tie down reinforcements from heading East and North, and swiftly hammer through China's northern defenses to take the Qing capital of Beijing and force an early surrender before the war necessitated General Uehara's plan of attrition.

The plan initially saw great success as the massed forces of Army Manchuria, along with freshly-imported reserves from the Japanese homeland and totaling more than 800,000 men, punched through one desperately-organized Chinese defensive line after another; within a week, the fighting could be heard from the Qing palace, and two weeks later the Qing court was forced to hastily flee & set up a provisional government further south as shattered defenses saw Japanese forces easily capture the virtually undefended seat of Chinese power. The vital port of Tianjin, home of most of the Chinese fleet - which was currently hemmed-in by the bulk of the Imperial Japanese Navy (IJN) blockade - was soon to follow, Chinese forces there surrendering to the beseiging forces mere hours before reinforcements from the south could relieve them.

Far in the southeast, the Army of Indo-China (drawn from the various "Indo-China Corps" stationed in Bengladesh and Indonesia) succeeded in using early numerical superiority & repelled early Chinese advances into the allied Shan States to occupy most of Yunnan province, forcing Chinese reinforcement to the south as initially planned. Further victories were seen on the high seas, as the IJN coaxed out and obliterated the Chinese fleet off the coast of Jeju, Korea, the first and last significant naval action of the war.

Few plans survive warfare, however; in the western region of Gansu, after intial successes, the Chinese defenders under command of General Zhou Ma proved particularly difficult to dislodge, frequently threatening to counterattack both exposed portions of the line and weak Tibetan allies despite numerical disadvantage. While eventually forced to retreat his army from northern Gansu to take defensive positions at Lanzhou, Zhou Ma's delaying actions sucked the momentum from the Japanese advance in the west, forcing warfare into a slow slog. Furthermore, the Japanese diversionary threat in Yunnan failed to draw as much interest as hoped as Chinese forces rushed to stabilize the northern border; the mighty Manchurian advance was forced to stop and consolidate the line in the north of the Zhongyuan, the central Chinese plains, when a sizable relief force from the south defeated the thinly-stretched Japanese forces on the far edge of the Japanese battle line and threatened to move east into Hebei province and outflank the main army.

Most damning of all, however, was the Qing government's adamant refusal to accept Japanese terms to peace, despite their current losses. Japanese leadership was either uninformed or willfully ignorant of the deep-rooted revanchist thought had taken hold of an entire generation in Qing China, having grown into adulthood with decades of repeated humiliation at the hands of Japanese imperialist aggression. Even though Qing autocrats felt a swift surrender to Japanese demands best for the long-term health of the nation, to do so would surely invite massive popular uprisings and the possible downfall of the entire Qing dynasty.

Two months into the war, with unconsolidated battle lines in the north and momentum lost to the battlecries of "remember national humiliation!" ringing from the Chinese counterattack, Japanese advances ceased, and Field Marshal General Uehara's doctrine of "bleeding the Chinese white" was soon adopted.

The Yellow River would soon run red with the blood of men.


The "Great Zhongyuan Crawl"
The successful Chinese counterattack at Datong near the Japanese Mongolian border threatened to open a hole in the Japanese battle line, but the threat faded as Manchurian reserves were rushed into the gap and put a stop to the Chinese counterpush. However, Japanese forces could not budge the fortified defenses around Baoding, and while Japanese forces repelled Chinese assaults on Tianjin and captured Cangshou further south, the advance halted in the banks of the Majia River, with Chinese guns and men dug into the opposing bank. From that point on, Uehara's defensive doctrine took root along the entire northern front; what was once a mobile war clamped down into a defensive slog for the next 8 months as battle lines were dug and machinegun positions brought to the front to counter the massing Chinese army, which already looked to outnumber Japanese regulars and reserves, with no sign of the growth slowing.

What followed became known as the "Zhongyuan Crawl," a slow advance by Japanese forces through the Central Plains, the heartland of Chinese civilization. Field Marshal Uehara, reviled among his peers for being an "annoying blowhard," was nevertheless a cunning tactician and strategist. He ordered his generals willfully present certain key sections of their lines as having obvious weakness; so encouraged, the Chinese armies would mass and throw themselves against the Japanese lines, which would feint a retreat into a pre-set trap of heavy machinegun crossfire as reserves plugged the hole, adding their guns to the salient-smashing slaughter. Repeated on a wide front, Chinese casualties were counted in the tens of thousands per day, with every dead Japanese man taking 10, 15, 20 Chinese to the grave with him; entire week-long battles saw bodies fall into veritable bunkers of flesh over which attaching troops had to climb to assault positions. Their assaults thrown into shattered, whole Chinese armies were decimated, regiments slaughtered to the man as the Imperial Japanese juggernaut, with Uehara Gentaro at its helm, held true to doctrine and ground forward through the bodies, following the retreating Chinese until faced once more with fresh opposition, and then repeating the process.

The world could only watch in shock as neverbefore seen single-day, single-battle casualty numbers soon eclipsed entire past wars: 100,000 dead & wounded at Kunming, 120,000 killed & captured at Datong, a further 150,000 lost at Wuding...for weeks, months, the bodies mounted, left for carrion and scavengers on the field of battle, too numerous to burn or bury as the war machine slowly, carefully clawed its way across the Central Plains. Death counts reached their bloodiest peak in May with nearly a million Chinese men and boys left as worm food in the fields, to say nothing of the caputred and wounded

Such is modern war.


The Battle of Shanghai
By July, General Uehara's plan to literally bleed China to death seemed to be working: Army Mongolia had pushed Chinese forces beyond Tianshui to Pingliang & Qingyang, while Army Manchuria had driven Qing forces to Henan province, but stalled in Shandong and Shanxi due to logistical issues and an over-stretched & overexhausted front line.

To exacerbate problems, the "Yun'an Linkup," whereby the two armies would meet and form one cohesive line of battle had not yet happened, a consequence of General Zhou Ma's continued and stubborn resistance in the west; furthermore, while losses to the Chinese side were devastating in the previous months, Japanese losses hadn't been anything to shake a stick at either, losing roughly 500,000 since the opening of hostilities, mostly in the west and during the opening months of war. Even if they were all untrained levies hastily drawn forth to the front lines, China still had a seemingly endless and replacable supply of men, a luxury Japan simply didn't have; the longer the war dragged on and the more casualties Japanese armies suffered, the more the war would, in due time, swing in favor of China.

A new strategy was needed to break the new stalemate and renew momentum in favor of Japan. Several options were considered by Japanese war command, the most popular of which included sending a fourth full army into the east or south of China, whereby opening a fourth front of battle. War Ministry advisors supported the plan, but Field Marshal Uehara himself remained skeptical, unwilling to throw his Home Guards Army into the conflict, which had so far been held in reserve in case support was needed along the current front, and leave himself with very few contingencies should anything go wrong on any other front. In the end, a compromise was had: after scouting the coast of China for a suirable invasion points, Uehara ordered the deployment of the 5th and 6th Home Guards Corps to assault Shanghai, whereby drawing resistance away from the other armies in the hopes of creating a breakthrough in the north.

Japanese landing parties arrived in Shanghai in late July with little resistance, and word of Japanese arrival had the desired effect: several divisions in Shandong retreated to defend against the new feinted "front," giving several Manchurian divisions the room they needed to make pushes on Weifang & Jinan; the two Home Guards Corps were easily capable of handling those divisions, and so the order was given to dig in and remain. The next day, however, saw the Japanese invasion force blindsided by a freshly-organized Chinese relief force from the south; with no time to scramble to the boats, the heavily outnumbered Japanese sought to use their tactical advantage to win the day...but the Chinese had grown wise to the tricks of the past and attacked along the entire front. Heavy bombardment and Chinese reinforcements several days later did much to weaken the Japanese position on the peninsula, and despite inflicting heavy casualties, the future of the battle remained uncertain.

Yet, in a critical blunder, just when it was safe to call a general retreat to the boats during a lull in the fighting, Japanese transports were sent to retrieve reserve reinforcements from the homeland. No one yet knows why the order for reinforcement was given, instead of the order to retreat. Possibly Japanese honor and sense of superiority prevented an admission of defeat, that maybe the plan wasn't as well thought out as believed. Whatever the reason, Japanese reinforcements arrived in Shanghai just before the defenders' positions were overrun, prolinging and eventually turning the tide of battle into a Japanese victory.

The cost was heavy. While the Japanese had inflicted 132,000 casualties, 109,000 Japanese lay dead and wounded on the battlefield, out of the total 144,000 to take part. The Japanese position was, ultimately, untennable in the face of Chinese forces possibly being reinforced in a matter of days, and a general retreat back to the boats was given.

109,000 men to die a futile death for an outcome that could have been achieved with less than half that number. 109,000 men to go to the slaughter for literally no good reason. None.

While considered a strategic success (in that it forced a withdraw of some Chinese forces in Shandong) and a tactical one (by forcing a retreat of the Chinese army sent to retake Shanghai), the Shanghai offensive is considered to be Japan's, and General Uehara's, most critical blunder of the war. Japan could not afford more "victories" of this kind, and the blunder to not only keep troops in Shanghai, but to reinforce them and create even more unnecessary death for an already dubious plan would have long-reaching effects in Japan's ability to reinforce its wavering front lines.

The victory at Shanghai could very well cause Japan to lose the war.