The Official Game Status Update Thread

[Seperallis]

Modern Warfare: The Battle of Daming
Part Two of
The Great Sino-Japanese War

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 1) <<
>> 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.
Depicted above are the news headlines following the end of the war.

The Yun'an Linkup
Following the Japanese gaff at Shanghai, the empire's military command seemed determined to avenge the losses and restore some of the tarnished honor lost during the ill-fated expedition. As previously stated, for all its faults, the Shanghai Offensive did at least fulfill its goal of diverting resources away from the front in the north; what seemed at one time as if the Japanese war machine was running out of steam was now all but a distant memory, as Japanese regiments battered back the beleaguered Chinese defenders again and again, making easy headway across the Majia River, and eventually encircling and forcing the defenders at Baoding to surrender.

Once again, the war was mobile, save one location...but that would soon change.

Since the outset of the war, General Ma Zhao made expert use of his numerical superiority to tie down Army Mongolia in the Gansu region out west, and though superior Japanese artillery slowly drove him on an eastward retreat, the casualties caused had given the attackers pause. Furthermore, the Chinese commander saw from the outset the danger posed if Army Mongolia and Army Manchuria were to link up, and even in retreat, he was always sure to move in such a way as to threaten, oppose, and deny any chance of the two Japanese forces of closing the long Chinese salient and consolidating their line; to allow the linkup would be to negate part of the Chinese Army's sizable advantage in manpower.

However, six months of a constant, if slow, forced retreat eastward had limited Ma Zhao's options within the closing vice of the two Japanese armies, while presenting his enemy with much more room to maneuver and a hole in the line near Tianshui to exploit. Stuck in the low ground near Pingliang, he and had long since sent for reinforcements to come bolster the defense on his southern flank lest he face enemies on three sides, but the reinforcements were too slow in coming: Japanese forces had noticed the hole and filled it, cutting off Ma Zhao's southern flank, pushing as far east as Baoji and occupying the primary route for Chinese reinforcement; with Chinese forces nearly encircled, Japanese elements from the north and west attacked the Chinese line in an attempt to break the north-east flank at Qingyang and force and encirclement of Ma Zhao's main army.

Qingyang held long enough for the main body of the Chinese army in the west to retreat along the last remaining road, southwest to Xi'an, before surrendering. Though heavy casualties had been inflicted and the route for the long-awaited Yun'an linkup finally lay uncontested, the victory seemed bittersweet, as the great and impetuous Ma Zhao, nemesis of Army Mongolia, once again escaped with his army intact.

Intact yes, but in a poor way in terms of both morale, men, and equipment. Ma Zhao's Army, though greatly reduced from half a year of fighting and retreating, still posed a significant threat as the largest and most experienced element of the Chinese army, and the failure to capture or destroy it came as a serious setback to Imperial plans to sweep through the rest of the Zhongyuan.

As it was, the order was given to remain cautious; though the Chinese army was greatly depleted in terms of equipment and well-trained men - now relying primarily upon conscripted and hastily-trained reserves - they still held a vast manpower advantage, and the several thousand field guns of Ma Zhao's artillery. Though the linkup at Yun'an and the push south along the Yellow River's basin did much to shorten the Japanese lines, months of fighting had taken their own toll upon the Japanese army, who was relying more and more upon its reserves to bridge the manpower gap especially since losing nearly 10% of its fighting capability at Shanghai.

The Japanese army was slowly approaching the point at which it simply could no longer maintain such a long front of battle.

Even so, Chinese resistance remained relatively light, as the two flanks of each army advanced together, closing up the long Chinese salient; enemy lines, lacking men and supplies, either fled en masse or simply crumbled under the weight of the once-again-mobile Japanese war machine, as it occupied the 100 miles between Yun'an and the river in the space of a month. With advances further east, it seemed the war would once again be over soon.

...and then, disaster again, as Japan loses an entire army corps to that cursed menace of the west.


The Battles of Daming
Ma Zhao, now fully supplied and given control of what more artillery the Chinese could spare, struck a reserve corps behind the main Japanese lines that had just finished clearing a pocket of Chinese resistance around the village of Daming. Unnoticed by Japanese command, who were too focused on the attack to notice the blunder, a hole had developed in the line just north of the Yellow River at Weihui. Not one to let a golden opportunity pass, Ma Zhao took his 350,000 men through the gap unnoticed by the enemy, catching the reserve corps unawares, and completely obliterating it, killing or capturing all 18,000 men.

The Scourge very well could have posed to threaten the entire Japanese war effort and turn the tide of the war...except that Gensui Uehara Gentaro had finally relinquished to pressure from his staff and, along with a fresh batch of men and reserves from Korea under the command of General Kageaki Itagaki, sent the entire Home Guards Army to the Chinese mainland to help shore up the front.

Having landed in Tianjin, General Kageaki and his contingent was on the way to the front when the sounds of battle could be heard near Daming, nearly 20 miles behind where the front should have been. Diverting his army to the source, he came across and promptly encircled the enemy army of nearly double his own size before Ma Zhao could react; forced to attempt a breakout, Ma Zhao directed his fire to an apparently weak reserve unit, leading with a heavy bombardment with his vastly superior artillery advantage before charging into the inexperienced reserve unit...but it was a ruse, as the enemy unit melted away behind the machineguns of the 6th Home Guards Corp.

The enemy was not fortified. It was not dug in. It was not prepared to be surrounded on all sides by machineguns, and what resulted was a more than 90% casualty rate as, caught in a crossfire yet refusing surrender, Ma Zhao repeatedly attempted a breakout before finally succeeding after several weeks...but losing more than 300,000 men to the Japanese 30,000.



With the most massive and deadliest battle the world had ever seen, the largest, most experienced and best-equipped contingent of the Chinese army was decimated; though still holding numerical superiority on paper, the Chinese lacked well-trained troops and equipment, and could never mount another threatening attack in the north.


Aftermath
Ma Zhao himself was killed in battle at Daming. China continued to hold onto the war effort for many months, though all attacks on the northern front had been abandoned; it was all they could do to send men to the front and hopefully stop the ever-encroaching Japanese lines as they crossed the expansive Zhongyuan.

The southern front in Yunnan was a different matter. Over the course of the war, the lines had remained fairly static after early Japanese advances, running from Zhaotong in the north to Wenshan in the south. While the balance of power in the south remained firmly with the Chinese, Japanese general and commander of the Indo-China forces Yoshimichi Akiyama's maneuvers both confounded and constantly foiled Chinese assault plans for many months as he simply remained too unpredictable to plan against. Eventually, however, an attack was decided upon, and though the Japanese forces initially held the line, casualties and overwhelming Chinese numbers forced the retreat in the center 20 miles back to Kunming, before fresh reinforcements from the homeland and Taiwan arrived in Vietnam in September and attacked the Chinese flank; the resulting fighting caused a complete collapse of the Chinese southern line by December.



Faced with complete military disaster, the Qing court, now hiding in Guangzhou in the south, was eventually pressured into unconditional surrender at the end of January, after almost 13 months of war. Japan had finally won undisputed hegemony over East Asia, as China was forced to unconditionally accept the forfeiture of Gansu Province, the forced reduction of its military, and pay hefty reparations to Japan.

But what was the cost? In China alone, the death toll was estimated in the tens of millions, many of China's young men dead on the battlefield with countless more claimed by disease and starvation. The war had not been kind to Japan either, draining the country of both its treasury and its able-bodied young men...and for what, some notion of honor? The power and fortunes of the rich? The Court? The Emperor? A little piece of land and some money? Honor?

Those seem like hardly justifiable reasons for the deaths of nearly 38 million people. With growing socialist, anti-war sentiment among the people and around the world, one can only hope that this time, at least, peace will last. Surely the ruling class will be sated now with their spoils.

One can hope, but when those men write peace accords forcing the punishment of the victims and never see themselves put to harm, war can only ever return.


Bonus Content!


Sadly, the hero of the Etheopian Campaign died a couple years after this war. He will be sorely missed.



This was quick. I won't bore you with how quick and easy it was.



A snapshot of the Japanese Empire, ca. 12 July, 1886