The Chinese Army may have been destroyed many times, but Chiang still has 10 million manpower in reserve... and another 20 million once he completes the counter-Inept Bureaucracy law and changed to Limited Conscription...
Worth noting that the Hengyang garrison which halted Ichigo for 47 days constituted one of Chiang's only remaining elite units -- the 10th Army Corps was fitted out with Soviet equipment from the 1938-1940 years. This was a veteran formation which partook in the 1st through 3rd Changsha Campaigns, and earned a reputation as the region's strongest combat unit. Yet even then by 1944 it found itself severely lacking in ammunition and was forced to rely on close-quarters combat. Also comparing Chiang to late war Hitler is unfair. Chiang never believed in elastic defense in the first place =P
He did. Look up "magnetic warfare" . It wasn't elastic defence the German way because Chinese divisions had really bad mobility, but it was about luring the Japanese to move away from their supply bases into battles where Chinese units had been prepositioned in favorable positions. The first and second battles of changsha, which the Chinese won are good examples. Chiang kai shek undermined the execution by trying to micromanage it, but he has believed in the principle.
@@porksterbob From what I have looked into different battles of the Second Sino-Japanese war, there is a quite clear trend of the Chinese using a tactic of having the Japanese become bogged down in urban combat before the Chinese counter attack from the rear and behind against the supplies forcing the Japanese into a retreat. This was exactly what happened in Changsha's three battles, while additionally it was the Chinese tactic deployed by the Alpha force unites in the battle for Chihchiang airfield in western Hunan, and in Changde where the Japanese took the city but were forced to retreat after being encircled by the counter attack.
As a Taiwanese, I'm fairly certain that the absences of Operation Ichigo would only prolonged the civil war, but the defeat of Nationalist was inevitable since 1936, when Chiang was kidnapped during Xi'an incident. The simple truth is that CCP's ideology at the time was more appealing towards the general populations, which at the time was like 90% of farmers. Nationalist or Communist, the people didn't care who's on top, they only care who could give them land to farm and feed themselves.
Yeah, that is why I avoided making a declarative statement on that front since other factors were at play well beyond simple military issues. Ichigo certainly helped, perhaps significantly, but the CCP had other major advantages.
Unfortunately for them, the feeding themselves part didn't improve under the Communists, it actually got worse. Mao was very good at getting into power, but was very bad at actually using it in a productive way. But you are generally correct that the general Chinese populace wasn't very nationalistic at that time, though this did change later on.
@@SeismicHammer Quality of life did improve a lot from 1949 to 1956, but everything went off the rails afterwards. The CPC as a whole did a decent job of governing without Mao screwing everything up.
@@hailexiao2770 After 1949, quality of life increased because the war had ended and people could go back to their normal lives. Given that the policies set by Mao and his ruling party later caused severe famine in peacetime, how much of the improvement was due to the communist government is a bit hard to determine. Conditions in China drastically improved once the government allowed for more open entrepreneurship later on, so it seems that when left alone, the Chinese people are pretty good at building things up.
@@SeismicHammer Chinese people is never really nationalistic, the "patriotic" chinese you see nowadays are just a result of CCP playing with people's sence of inferiorty and ignorance.
Note on the map: I know it is geographically challenged in parts. I wanted to use one from Hans van de Ven's book, but that might have brought up usage/copyright issues so we had to go with the open source wiki map. It does the job, but with a few bizarre errors. Some detail related to the availability of sources: The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) closely guards its archives, granting limited access to select historians. Not all PRC scholars are propagandists, though some certainly are. There are many historians in the PRC who legitimately do their best to push our understanding forward, but they must tread lightly. The work of these scholars is indispensable, as the snippets they provide from the CCP archives and other sources are all we are likely to get until the CCP either ceases to exist or radically opens up. Under Xi Jinping, we are seeing significant backsliding in academic freedom and the reinforcement of heavily propagandistic narratives. With the collapse of Marshal Law on Taiwan in the late 1980s our access to wartime KMT records, and other critical resources such as Chiang Kai-shek's extensive diaries, has steadily increased. With it we have a much better understanding of the Nationalist war effort and the KMT in general. It can be a very heated topic as the KMT still continues to exist, at least in name, as one of the two major political parties in a now vibrant democracy. Therefore you get angry "greens" (Green Party or Green-aligned) that want to destroy any aspect of the KMT legacy and angry "blues" (KMT or KMT-aligned) working to whitewash or pump up the KMT. As an example of how far we have come, I started reading the first extensive English-language biography of He Yingqin only a couple weeks ago. It complete overturns our previous assumptions about this important figure, often blown off as corrupt, incompetent, and inconsequential. It is based on extensive Chinese-language primary source research and plenty of work from historians on both sides of the Taiwan strait. It is an exciting time to be studying the history of China in this pivotal period! Japanese records are a mixed bag. The Japanese (and Chinese) language is difficult, and this is made worse because written Japanese of the period used Kanji (borrowed Chinese characters) differently than modern written Japanese, adding an additional hurtle. The Japanese (along with some help from USAAF) destroyed large swaths of their military and other records at the end of the war, which limits our understanding. Russian, British, American, German, etc. sources are also valuable and more materials (with the exception of the Russians) are coming available at a fairly steady pace.
CCP do have a bad reputation for opening its archives, but the Taiwan Regime is another interesting story. Basically the leading party now is using the advantage of bomb shelling archives to put their KMT "friends" into a political grave yard. Not saying it is a bad move, but using administrative means to attack a political enemy? emmm Also Chiang Kai-shek's diaries is a joke, showing how a side swinging guy he was, and when you deep dive into even the KMT record, tons of errors can be found. In turns of quality Chiang's diaries are way worse than those of Manstein's/Guderian's.
It's a miracle that the CCP allowed a change in it's ww2 narrative that the KMT hardly did any fighting and were cooperating with the Japanese and that the CCP did all the fighting. They officially allow the narrative that the KMT did a big portion or a majority of the fighting along with the CCP. That they allow this recognition at all is a miracle and a major change to CCP propaganda.
@Tdan Kendros No not really. Both wars were equally important. Only not of the allies. For them the third Reich had more priority because it was much more dangerous for them. But the second world war has kinda started in Asia in 1937. (Atleast in my opinion)
That might be referring to the Inner Mongolia region of China (Portions of Northern and Northeastern China) That, or the map has some geographical concerns.
I think they think Japan's screw up in China was more important than it actually was. It was a side show, at best - a fool's move by foolish politicians. Compare this pissant fighting to what was going on in Europe just a few years later. And Europeans participated in the Geneva Convention (for the most part).
I was wondering why it seemed familiar, but then said to myself "that's Operation Ten-Go you're thinking of". 5:45 Rationale. 12:00 Operations. 24:00 Aftermath.
Excellent! There is a paucity of information on the later stages of the Second Sino Japanese war both in books and on RUclips. I can get behind more of these videos. Keep me coming!
I have read this Japanese offensive from the Time-Life WW2 collection maybe 30 years ago, but seriously this is the first time i heard it again since that....very good guys well done 🤗
Justin is an amazing guest. Knowledgable, articulate, funny, and humble. The war in the Pacific is so misunderstood (including by me!). Great to see this content.
Well, The Great Wall was not really useful for more than one thousand years. Chinese cities used to have city walls surrounding them. No, they were not useful once the Chinese invented gunpowder. The Mongols first (?) used to breached city walls all the way to Europe.
I also never header about an offensive of such a scale. No one really explained to me why the nationalists had stronger forces, but communists won, or why nationalists forces took more casualties than communists when fighting Japan. Heard something about the Burma road and thats it. But its in the communist mindset to expand revolution, where capitalist wars destroyed societies materially and morally. Lenin got to power thanks to Germany winning the war with Russia. Hitler was Stalins "icebreaker of revolution". So no surprises that Mao took power the way he did.
I have more than one book that refers to operation Ichi Go was the fifth, last and largest of the "Rice offensives." One of the major goals was to capture that autumn's rice harvest so as to feed Japan. Justin mentions the famine afflicting China, but fails to mention that a large part of that famine were the actions of the Japanese army.
Zacharye Sheehan The food problematic in Asia isnt tackled often in the western literature. Japan was close to starvation in 1945 due to the destruction of its merchant fleet which brought the food from mainland Asia
I simply didn't have time. Mitter, van de Ven, and others go into great deal regarding Japanese economic warfare against China. None of the sources I have, including Drea (the English-language's leading IJA historian), mention seizing crops as one of the core objectives of Ichigo. However, it wouldn't surprise me in the least if that were an objective, and given that IJA units were ordered to live off the land it was already implicitly going to happen.
Couple of things 1. Communist bases area in Northern China has being established since 1938 to 1940, however, these area have between constantly subjected to constant "counter-insurgency" efforts of both the Japanese and puppet Wang Jingwei government that involve killing entire village, burning of crop during harvest time and destroying irrigation in areas suspected of supporting the communists. Thus bases has being contained and declining after especially severe campaigns in 1942 and 1943. These effort disappeared in 1944, which give the communist breathing room to shore up those areas. 2. Wang Jingwei's "alternative" KMT forces is completely ignored in your analysis, however, their strength is quite significant. I believe by the war's end there is still ~500k to be collected and disbanded, and during its height the number is well over a million. However, they are mostly assigned to security duties and fighting mainly against the communist as they are deemed to be unreliable when fighting against their fellow KMT. 3. The archives in China are hardly seal, you can always file requests and unless you’re touching top secret stuff, they usually approved rather quickly. If you don’t want to go through the complex procedures, you can always access the already published stuff, which there is tons of. For example, tax and financial records of communist rear areas in northern china was published in the 1980s. You can find them here, though none of them are translated: books.google.com/books?id=yrYbAQAAMAAJ books.google.com/books?id=521bAAAAIAAJ books.google.com/books?id=ce5sAAAAIAAJ There is also selected records of combat actions reports from Shanxi/Hebei/Central Inner Mongolia region. books.google.com/books?id=ARdIAAAAMAAJ One person you could contact is 萨苏, he is a Chinese who (used to?) live in Japan that famous for written books (《国破山河在》、《尊严不是无代价的》、《突破缅北的鹰》、《退后一步是家园》) of the war by comparing war records from both the Chinese and Japanese achieve, with special focus on air war and armored warfare. However, his recent book are on organized crime in the late Qing, early republic, and British HK so not sure if he’s still interested in the subject. His weibo is here blog.sina.com.cn/u/1197950454
First of all, great post! Indeed, there is more available from the PRC than people assume, with some great scholars contributing to the literature, but there is still a lot that is held back for obvious reasons and access to archives are used as a weapon against any scholars the CCP deems "hostile." I couldn't comment on the forces of the puppet troops beyond my one mention because they are almost completely ignored in the English literature, which is all I have access to unfortunately. I know they were there and used against the communists and in the rear areas, but their story has yet to be told in English beyond the most superficial of mentions. Discussion of Reorganized Nationalist China in English is generally limited to the higher political level, with a couple of works I know of looking broadly at collaboration, but not from a military perspective. Some social histories and such are floating around as well IIRC.
The response of the Japanese to the hundred regiments offensive and the devastating effect it had on the communists in North China is too often ignored by the ccp friendly histories. The ccp attacked the Japanese in force one time. And the response was as devastating to the communists as ichigo was to the nationalists so the communists stopped directly fighting Japan after 1940 unless forced. (With good reason) It's only recently that the ccp has been willing to admit that the kmt did most of the fighting.
@@porksterbob porksterbob if you actually read official military history I. China (ones published by PLA press for example), you'll find that counter counter-insurgency experiences from 1940 onwards is featured heavily in military history studies and a center piece in development of PLA doctrines on both strategic and tactical level all the way to the 1980s. (Commonly refered to People's War in the west) Second, PRC has never downplayed NRA efforts in official history studies, it is the defeats are given far more attention than victories. The only difference in recent decades the blame for the KMT failure are falls more on strategic failure, rivalries and inefficiencies with in the NRA rather than just blame everything on ideology, corruption and indifference. However, in popular media, there are more movies and TV shows glorifying the CCP war effort than KMT, with more Pro-KMT show in the last few years compared to before. But that's expected, how show glorifying the Red Army that Hollywood makes for every saving private Ryan and band of brother out there, even though the Soviets did most of the fighting against the Germans. The only one I can think of is Enemy at the the gates, which basically speak for itself. At China did justice in the Tai'ezhuang movie, and that movie came out in 1986. ruclips.net/video/QQXxo4Kp9Es/видео.html
@@WangGanChang expecting the US to give equal shrift to non Americans is a stretch. For China, the official narrative until the 80s was that the ccp did most of the fighting against Japan. It's like how most people today think Mao ended the unequal treaties, when they were actually ended in 1942,1943, and 1946.
My father was an advisor to the Nationalist forces during the war in particular to a Nationalist Artillery Battalion. Dad never spoke of the war and the story was related to me by his assistant in 1959. The battalion was equipped with US pack 75mm howitzers. When the Japanese struck the battalion began an orderly withdrawal but then the commander and his staff got scared and bolted. Within four hours the rest of battalion took all the horses except dad's and Sergeant Jackson's and left without spiking the guns or destroying the ammunition. It was left to dad and Sergeant Jackson to do that. They got finished and were just crossing the crest of a hill when the Japanese reached the guns. Sergeant Jackson said they had only gone about 100 yards down the hill when the explosion occurred effectively putting a halt to Japanese advance in their area for a couple of hours. There were several very hair raising moments as they withdrew. When I was finally got dad to talk about it the one thing he said that stood out was the number of Japanese that seemed to suddenly appear. Really enjoyed this about the forgotten theater of war.
@@GeneralLiuofBoston1911 what the commenter is meaning is the IJA had an operational success with an all-out offensive. Meanwhile, the Navy’s last all-out operation - Sho-Go 1 - was an almost complete failure. And since the IJA and IJN had been locked in a cold war/small scale civil war for a couple of decades by this point, it was a major domestic victory for the IJA as well.
@@Engine33Truck Even then it was uncontested. The Japanese Navy in 1944-1945 was on its last legs. Yes the Japanese Army was rather weakened and didn't hold up the same prowess as it did in the earlier stages of the war, but they still managed to mobilize, which is something that the IJN couldn't achieve to the same extent, nor to the same level of success in terms of victories. But in the end, the Japanese Army's southern offensives ended poorly as a result since although major strategic areas were gained, it left the army unable to launch another, especially after the Soviet Union entered the war and poured into Manchuria.
Alright,Your guest just might be one of the best researchers on the tube along with Richard Frank for the Sino-Japanese part of the Pacific War.,and has thus far given your channel the best account of this offensive.. Mao Zedong would've been a good "Risk" board game player . . . That's not necessarily a compliment.
Excellent podcast! I've been curious about one aspect of the war, that I can't seem to find any info on. When Italy entered the war in 1940, I'm aware that they tangled with the British on the modern day borders of Lybia and Egypt, as well as in the Horn of Africa with Somaliland and around Ethiopia. Documentation about Italy's combat against French forces on the Alpine line and in Corsica are also available, however I can't seem to find any details about combat between French and Italian forces in North Africa on the Lybian-Tunisian border prior to the instalment of the Vichy Regime, which ended their hostilities. Could you please perhaps shed some light on this topic in an upcoming video?
@@randomguy-tg7ok also given the short amount of time the French were in the war (at that point ofc) and the lack of any real incentive for the Allies to overrun Libya at this point in the war
This is one of the best world war II informative discussions that I have heard in a long time. I wish you would have taken much longer and in more detail. Would love to hear more on this
6:43 "What other type of thinking would you (as the Japanese command) would you be doing at this point?" Thoughts of surrender seem a reasonable answer.
No, if I'm an Imperial Japanese commander I would not be considering surrender because the culture I would have been raised in would have taught me that surrender is genuinely not an option and that victory is assured. You always, *always* need to take context into account with this kind of thing. In some cases, cultural values and views can drastically change how people will react. I'm not saying that I approve of Imperial Japan's culture; I think any culture that can create as horrific an event as the rape of Nanjing is awful and quite frankly terrifying. But we do need to understand that that culture was there in Japan at that time and that it shaped what people believed and the values they held.
Several senior officers were assassinated for considering surrender by more fanatical junior officers. This continued to the end with the plot to kill the Emperor himself to prevent surrender.
No complete Japanese unit surrendered , for most world war 2 armies 1 man surrendered for every 3 killed . With Japan this leaps out to 1 surrender per 140 deaths .
Considering the Japanese Emperor had to send family members delivering messages to certain isolated units in the Pacific to convince them that his decision to surrender was legitimate, surrender wasn’t really on their minds.
It seems worth pointing out that while, yes, US policy was to keep Nationalist China in the war "on the cheap," there also just wasn't a whole lot more that could have been done if they'd wanted to. Between Japanese control over the coastal areas and the Himalayas blocking landward access to China from India, there simply wasn't a good way to get materials or forces into China. *Perhaps* the Western Allies could have made the CBI theater, and re-opening the Burma Road, a higher priority. But terrain, distance, and weather limited the size and effectiveness of forces that could be employed in that theater, even if additional forces could have been released from other theaters. So even that doesn't seem like a sure thing - and I can't, off the top of my head, think of a lot of other ways the Western Allies could have helped Nationalist China.
I wonder...... FDR, was a bigot and hated ASIANS. Churchill, will..... We know he was no better. Not was there very much left, With the other campaigns having a priority. I will give a great deal of the blame to FDR. His lack of vision as well not having any historical or cultural knowledge of China. Doomed the Chinese.
@@knutdergroe9757 it wasn't fdr. It was stilwell and Marshall. Fdr gets responsibility for putting them in, but those two were the ones who fucked over the kmt.
Yep. It just wasn't that important to the US, or the British, since they knew that the days of world empire were coming to an end. It makes me sad that most Americans still see the Japanese as near sighted fanatical bonzai charging jungle warfare experts, when in reality they were a strongly mechanized professional army, the kind that were rarely experienced in the Island hopping campaign. It wasn't until Yamashita's defense of the Philippines that the US really understood that the war on the land was just as important as the war at sea, and even more bloody.
@@princeofcupspoc9073 I've never actually understood the disdain that most Americans (in less history passionate circles) show towards the Japanese war efforts (and specifically anything related to sacrificing oneself on the field of battle)
That's the point the historians make. They don't suggest that the Western Allies should have done more, they just note that they didn't. China was a low-priority theatre and whenever Chinese theatre concerns bumped up against the concerns of another theatre, China lost every time. That was totally fine from the perspective of the Western Allies fighting a global war, but that fact didn't make it any easier on the Chinese. It also makes late and post-war claims that China "wasn't fighting" even more disgusting. Promises made to the Chinese by the western allies were repeatedly broken, the largest of which being a massive operation to retake Burma (including amphibious landings and massive naval support). It was promised and then killed as the resources were needed elsewhere. Was that justifiable in the global context? Yes. Was it still a broken promise that hurt China specifically? Yes.
Chiang wanted to use the Y Force that was being send to Yunnan to hold off the Japanese, but stupid Stilwell said no just to avenge his humiliation in Burma. Chiang from the being told him NOT to engage the Japanese in a set battle cause the Chinese Expeditionary Force was form with most of the elite units china had and COMPLETELY irreplaceable. So when Ichigo was underway there went THE ONLY FORCE that could have stop the Japanese into Burma where the C.B.I. can handle by themselves.
Any Chinese that grows up in mainland China should know this (under a different name) if they pay any attention in the history class. I still remember reading about this in middle school history book. I especially like to read the part about the siege of HengYang. I admire the bravery, tenacity and resilience of the KMT soldiers. They are my heroes. On the Internet, there are still many articles talking about the 1944 defensive at HengYang, of course mainly in the Chinese language. Many people from the west never heard of it because the west media is not interested in it. The media always tries to cover what the public cares or values. In this sense, the fact that not many people from west ever heard of the 1944 Japanese offense symbolizes how the west in general undervalues the contributions of the Chinese people during and before WW2 (to the Chinese people, WW2 started from 1931).
Jagdtiger How are the Flying Tigers covered in PRC text books. US Army Aviators before World War II resigned their commissions and travelled to China to fly US fighter planes that the US supplied the Chinese military. Americans were shooting down Japanese military aircraft before World War II. 😐😐😐😐😐😐😐
@@John77Doe we do have lots of historical books and references about general Chennault and his brave air fighters , their accomplishments were not forgotten. I can still recall a picture I saw in my secondary school history class that displays a young Chinese guard standing next to a giant Curtis p40 fighter with a shark jaw painted on its head. It was very impressive. There is also a flying tiger memorial museum in Zhijiang ,Huaihua where once located the headquarter of AVG during WII.
@@西方负典编译组 One of the Flying Tiger fighter pilots survived the air combat missions and brought crispy fried Chinese noodles as a snack back to the USA. After flying a combat mission against the Japanese, upon landing, his Chinese ground crew would bring him hot tea and crispy fried Chinese noodles. After World War II, when he returned to civilian life, he opened up a factory in the US to make crispy fried Chinese noodles as a snack. When I was a boy in the late 1960's, you could still buy them in US grocery stores along side potato chips and pop corn. I suppose, you can google it. 😐😐😐😐😐😐😐
Glad to see a video on this. It's surprising how little attention is given to an operation of this scale, though less surprising I suppose given the similar amount of inattention to major Soviet operations of the Second World War with respect to how much attention the operations of the Western Allies receive.
The defeat of Germany took "English brain, American brawn, and Russian blood" The Russians lost almost as many people at Stalingrad (~900,000) as the USA (~400,000) and UK (550,000-585,000) combined for the entire war.
Another massive and largely unknown campaign was the Soviet invasion of Manchuria in 1945. Arguably this was just as an important factor in the Japanese surrender as the atomic bombs.
Wow, mind blowing. I am 60 (over) yo, and finally starting to understand "Who Lost China?" question, and, even hearing an answer. Really enjoyable, and enlightening. I guess I am growing up....many thanks!!!! love this channel....
23:45 The Mighty Jingles-fandom confirmed! ^^ BTW I absolutely love Justin's* professional look at the topic and his narration style and voice! * Please credit him in every video - I don't know his last name or what his professional background is.
@@Legitpenguins99 arguably not. mao's rule has two major disasters of course, but there were positives, for instance, it unified the country under a strong central government and whatever you think of them, it was far less corrupt than the nationalist in 44,45. by 1950, china was considered a major power though its show of force in the korean war, having dealt the longest retreat of a regular army unit in all us history, though china was only really a power player in near by areas due to a lack power projection capabilities, non the less base on those two things, an slight improvement in relations with the west was all it took to acquire the unsc permanent seat from the kmt in the 70s. now you could argue that the kmt, had it won the civil war, may have lead to a better china today, but thats not a given it could very well have lead to a worse china, like an even worse version of india today
@@kstreet7438 that estimate is based on faulty math. its almost a given that the famine killed at least a few million. but the 45-60 million number is a bad estimate based on what the growth rate was before the famine and what the actual population was after the famine and taking the difference as the number "killed" this completely ignores things like people having fewer children due to.... idk.... famine? people having no children due to dying of starvation(they would count as killed but the bad estimate counts their non-existent children as killed as well). in a modern example, those estimates would literally equate things like getting a vasectomy to killing like 2 kids(depending on general growth rate of the nation).
It's a homophone, but is spelled with different kanji (Chinese characters). Hence, different words. Although "Operation Strawberry" is pretty damn amusing. 🤣🤣🤣
@@MilitaryHistoryNotVisualized I misunderstood it as operation fifteen or one five. 一五 I think would be better to write operation number one (ichi-go) in English. They pronounced almost the same so can't be helped when talking. Same with the strawberry. Thanks to the video. I knew there was an operation there from a game War in the Pacific, but i had no details or even know the name.
Good informative talk on a front that's hard to get history about in the West. Thanks for that. Military History Not Visualized is a good name for your channel though, as 30+ minutes looking at the same map is a great way to use RUclips like the 100 year old technology called radio. But I did listen to the whole thing anyway because it's excellent, and your summation in the end about China's experience at the end of the war compared to the other powers of the Big 4 was spot on!
Operation Ichi-Go is an operation conducted by the Japanese Army on the Chinese mainland from April 17th to December 10th, 1944 during the Sino-Japanese War. It was the last major offensive of the Japanese Army, which caused the National Revolutionary Army to be hit hard and affected during the Chinese Civil War. However, on the other hand, the United States is also mediating the conclusion of the Double Tenth Agreement with Chiang Kai-shek in order to avoid a civil war. According to a study by Barbara W. Tuchman, the results of this operation had a more significant impact on the subsequent war situation than the Japanese had imagined, and had a decisive impact on Japan's fate. According to it, Franklin Roosevelt has consistently strongly trusted and supported Chiang Kai-shek since the beginning of the war, and encouraged him in the war against Japan so that he would not drop out of the Allies in a single peace with Japan during the Cairo Conference. However, he said that he changed his mind because the front of Chiang Kai-shek collapsed due to this operation. In fact, Chiang Kai-shek has not been invited to important Allied conferences ("Yalta Conference" and "Potsdam Conference") since then. According to the Stilwell document, Roosevelt said, "Can China win?" Stilwell said, "There is no choice but to eliminate Chiang Kai-shek." During the 1944 Hengyang battle, he could not sleep at night and twice. He says he thought about suicide. The American side also planned to assassinate Chiang Kai-shek, and three methods of "poisoning", "aircraft incident", and "pretending to be suicide" were considered, but it was canceled in 1944 due to changes in the international situation such as Burma. The successor that the United States envisioned is Sun Fountain. As Roosevelt's Chief of Staff George Marshall and General Joseph Stilwell have long insisted, Chiang Kai-shek's army is actually a demoralized and corrupt organization that does not form an army. It became clear that he had no desire or ability to fight with the United States and other Allied forces. As a result, President Roosevelt changed the scenario of the operation against Japan from the conventional bombing of Japan and other countries from the air bases of mainland China to the one that MacArthur and others claimed to occupy the islands of the Pacific Ocean one after another. China was dismissed at the Yalta Conference, and the Allied nation's footsteps were disturbed, with angry Chiang Kai-shek presenting a peace plan to Japan against the will of the United States. The Japanese Operation Ichi-Go attack left the National Revolutionary Army with 750,000 casualties. This caused the Kuomintang to lose to the Communist Party in the civil war. China would not have been dominated by the dictatorship Communist Party if it had made peace with Japan and cooperated in protecting it from communism.
Very informative video. You are correct in that this isn't really talked about, I learned a lot just from the description never-mind the video. Thank you!
Re 11:30 (sum kind of negotiated settlement with japan) The war with japan did not end unconditionally, despite all the unconditional surrender rhetoric. D. M. Giangreco's Hell to Pay sheds some light on the subject.
Worth also pointing out that the strategic goal of opening a land route for resource flow from the SRA through China seems pretty questionable. The Japanese had such a lousy record in terms of engineering efforts that I don't see how they could have created a road - let alone a rail - network to allow any sort of efficient resource flow. The Burma Railroad took 1.5 years to build, using materials scrounged from infrastructure elsewhere in occupied DEI and Malaysia and made extensive use of POWs as labor and still only managed a throughput barely enough to supply Japanese troops in Burma in the end.
Great upload, China had been a battleground for ages against Japan with barely any assistance from the Allies. Meanwhile out in Europe, the Eastern Front, the Mediterranean Theaters, that's where all the resources of the Allies went to.
@@jakewoolard9373 Destruction of the Japanese navy didn't happen until late 1944 with Leyte Gulf. Heavy bombing of mainland Japan didn't happen until the very late stages of the war. The Second Sino-Japanese War started in 1937. The only real support from the Allies to Japan was mainly from the United States, and even then, more of the US aid went elsewhere. Everyone else was "thoughts and prayers." The United States military did not have to deal with much of the Imperial Japanese Army... The bulk of the army was in China, Southeast Asia, or in Japan itself.
@@Warmaker01 I feel like you're ignoring some key parts of why they didn't help, which is that the allies were also busy. The 2nd Sino-Japanese war (and WW2 esentially) started in 1937, but the USA didn't join until December 1941, and they were able to start bombing Japan only once their air bases were close enough to do so, despite the fact that there had been and would continue to be smaller bombing missions in China. Same thing with the "late" destruction of the Japanese Navy, which they were destroying bit by bit in various battles between 1942 and 1944. The USSR had come to a truce with Japan after Khalkin Gol and then went to battle after they had finished dealing with the Nazis, because logically that's where all their resources went (you can't ask them to help you fight Japan thousands of kilometres away when they have a real problem of their own and have a truce with them). The British and French were busy since 1939 in Europe and North Africa but they were at peace with Japan at the time until the japs declared war on them some time later, in which France and Britain lost horribly because of the sudden attack. Also, the British Raj was an active frontline of the war until the very end of it, so again, it's hard to deviate resources from India to China in that regard. You're ignoring the context of the war, it would be the same as me saying that it was very mean for China to not send aid to fight in the Western Front of WW1.
U-Go was a separate operation, but timing was linked to my understanding. I will be doing a chat specifically on Burma sometime down the line. I have only just started reading up on all the sources and I want to do it justice before I put something out there. I definitely want to avoid talking about Burma/India alongside something like Ichigo, because I feel strongly that it should get its own "time in the Sun." Think this chat, but with brief mention to China (basically, that Ichigo was happening) and way more on Burma.
i knew i can always trust MHV and justin to do this part of history justice. most people i see talk about WW2 china usually favor either nationalist or the communist in their narrative, with english speaking side favoring nationalist the most and chinese speaking side favoring communist most. and you guys navigated that mine field like nobody's business. on a side note, i always think the nationalist and the communist's tactic supplemented each other better than their alliance itself. i can imagine it being a nightmare for IJA officer trying to adapt to enemy with 2 drastically different methods, where focusing on one would leave opening for the other.
Thanks! I do try, but it is tough. One thing I didn't bring up in the video, but I have been thinking about more and more, is that the whole "who did more" debate is entirely asinine and ultimately pointless. One major advantage the CCP had over the KMT was that they could resist Japan AND build strength for the civil war with the same actions. Base areas and party infrastructure that was developed during the War of Resistance undermined and hurt the Japanese, but they didn't disappear with the Japanese surrender. The CCP was able to turn them on the KMT. The KMT on the other hand had to choose, because they were fighting predominately, but not exclusively, as a conventional force. A division thrown against the Japanese hurt the Japanese, but it was one more unit that would be chewed up before being used against the communists. The way the CCP rebuilt, expanded, and fought was exceptionally smart for the context.
It also should be noted that like the hollowing out of the KMT, the IJA in China went from the elite of the IJA in the 1930s to a husk of it's former self. With elite units before shipped out to fight WW2 and heavy units had all their equipment shipped out to replacement loses in the Pacific. So while the IJA is in a better shape than the KMT but they both lived off the land by 1944. By 1944 the IJA in China was largely living off the land as Japanese logistics become almost none existent as Japanese shipping collapsed. Japanese industrial capability was heavily damaged by B-29 raids to the extent that B-29s ran out of targets with firebombing wiping out majority of Japanese cities. The Japanese logistics situation was so bad in Vietnam in mid 1944 that one Japanese freighter captain refused to take Allied POWs to the mainland as he told them the waters were so full of US submarines that you could walk on them.
Heavy ally bombing started in early 1945, largely Japanese industries were not damaged at all around Ichigo time. Ichigo received top priority per logistics as introduced in this video anyway.
Shock and awe. I'd never heard a peep of this. I had wondered, without aid of even a story, why the US wasn't bombing Japan from China. Now its obvious. You guys, and others on utube are expanding history. Thanks
1944: Finland: (switched sides) Romania: (switched sides) Bulgaria: (switched sides) Italy: (most of it has surrendered a full year ago) Hungary: "Germany hlp pls?" Croatia: "Shyt, Tito's partisans are coming with a vengance" Germany: "LEEROY JENKINS!" (gets horribly murdered in Belarus and France) Japan: (while taking a beating in the Pacific) "I'M ABOUT TO PULL OFF WHAT THEY CALL A PRO GAMER MOVE!"
A RUclipsr going into the Asian theatre for more than 2 minutes? Amazing. Could you do a video on the 100 Regiments Offensive? I heard of it being a major turning point in the war where the CCP engaged in direct combat for the first time in the war on a large scale, but never saw an analysis for how this changed the theatre or Japanese strategy specifically
I remember reading about how this was partly the fault of Chennalt's over confidence in the air Corps ability to protect and assist the Chinese in the destruction of the Japanese. He persuaded Roosevelt to direct more resources to the Air Forces over the hump and less for land forces under Stillwell. Still well and the ground forces didn't have the supplies they needed to counter Japan and the Air Force could not deliver on Chennalt's rosy visions with destroying the enemy. I love Chennalt, but he was wrong about his predictions about air power.
One of the reasons the allies didn't fight this as much as you would think is because it removed a lot of troops that could have been used to defend the home Islands with no easy way to get them back. This was before the atomic bombs were built so military planners had to consider an invasion. Look at it as a much bigger piece of the wither on the vine strategy where not every island occupied by the Japanese was invaded just by passes and left to wither.
As you said it was 7 years into the War, losing most industrial cities, so the ability of replenishing troops was nightmare. While corruption was common, I don't think loss of Kogo 1should be blamed on army corruption. I recalled KMT blamed it on Stilwell for "mis-allocation" of resource into Burma. Meanwhile Chang had his problem in replenishing his troops which tended to favour his own loyal KMT troops instead of "warlord" troops or worse Communist troops who on paper was reporting to Chang on common enemy Japan. Warlord commander had to fight on the notion that they had to find their own re-supply, which during early days go WW2, commanders had the concept that if their division strength was down to 2000 strong, they were demoted to brigade commander (hence the Han execution)
It’s not forgotten. Very few Westerners cared. US and British was in planning and execution of Operation Overlord, and 3 millions of Germans and 6 millions of Russians were still slugging out in Eastern Front.
@3:18 "that China was to be maintained in the war at minimum costs" Supplying China was expensive. The Japanese cut the Burma Road in 1942 and the replacement Ledo Road didn't reach China until January 1945. From 1942 on, the primary supply route was flying cargo planes over "The Hump", and even after the Leo Road opened, The Hump was still the primary supply route with the road augmenting it. So many planes were lost flying The Hump that it became know as "The Aluminum Highway" (for all the visible crashed planes). If I remember correctly, almost all the supplies being flown in supported the US forces, primarily the Air Corps, initially fighters (The Flying Tigers) and later bombers and eventually B-29s to strike Japan. At the end of their flights, the cargo planes could be within range of Japanese fighter planes and USAAC fighter protection was essential to keeping losses from becoming unsustainable (air frames and air crews). Q: Any sense of what the author (Rana Mitter, Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945) thought the Allies could have done to get more supplies to the KMT armies?
Not have Stilwell intentionally withholding large sums of it as a form of coercion for starters. It also goes beyond supply and toward numerous broken allied promises to the Chinese. They had reasons to break them, good reasons in many cases, but they were broken just the same. Whenever the Chinese theatre concerns came up against the concerns of another theatre in the global war, China lost every time. Again, for good reasons from the Allied perspective, but the Chinese were left out to dry all the same. That is what he and other historians mean by minimum cost. China was not a primary theatre in the global war. Rightfully from a broad allied perspective, but that didn't help the KMT any. They were a junior allied partner, and were treated as such. No historian I have read suggests the allies should have dropped everything to pour resources into CBI, they just point out the reality of the situation.
Not mess up the defense of Burma in the first place. Stilwell's leadership changed what could have been a minor defeat into a catastrophic strategic loss. Stilwell pushed for Chinese and commonwealth forces to be positioned 100 miles closer to Japanese forces than they needed to be. Stilwell had a "hunch" (his words) that the Japanese were weak a month after the Japanese had gone through malaya like a buzz saw and defeated the British in Rangoon and sittang bridge. Stilwell's plan was for the Chinese under American command to work with British, Indian, Australian, and Burmese troops under British command to conduct a coordinated elastic defense followed by a counter offensive. That is insane. We know how much trouble British and French forces had coordinating during the Battle of France with months to prepare. Or the amount of coordination problems between the Americans and the British in 1944 with years to prepare. Stilwells plan required flawless coordination of troops from six nations under three different commands with no history of working together against superior forces with better training and equipment. Of course it doesn't work and Stilwell blames the Chinese and the British for messing up his plan. Had the allies tried what the British and the Chinese had initially suggested (you know the guys who have experience fighting Japan) they would have ceded southern Burma, built a defensive line just south of mandalay, and bought time for Chinese troops to arrive and fortify themselves as well as sort out communication issues. It may still have gone wrong, but they only have to hold from March until May when the summer monsoon makes all offensive action impossible. If the allies hold North Burma in 1942, it becomes much, much safer and cheaper to supply China from India. (the arakan mountains are much lower than the himalayas) and much easier to kick the Japanese out of Burma entirely. The Japanese only went for the full occupation of Burma in 1942 they couldn't believe their luck in being able to surround, defeat, and destroy all of the allied forces in southern Burma.
Japan hit the right people except for the US. With their strong navy they knew China couldn’t be helped by sea. A What If? question is if they’d said to the US we won’t touch a thing of yours, or Australia and NZ but we’ll kick the Europeans out of Asia how would things have gone? Germany wouldn’t have declared war on the US when it did. The US wouldn’t have had the political will to grow so quickly militarily. They could sit it out but feed machines to Russia and GB at great profit. The IJN had learnt their lesson not to tangle with the Soviets. The British Empire was at death’s door and vulnerable. The resources they needed were there for the taking. The answer of course is in their leadership and the military’s influence on it.
@@stevepirie8130 This reply is off the topic of the video, but your statement that Japan could have continued the war in China without bringing in the US is wrong. Because of the war in China, the US had slapped crippling sanctions/embargos on Japan, most notably steel and oil. At the time of the Pearl Harbor attack, Japan had calculated that they had 6 months before the shortages became severe. The choice to continue the conquest of China meant that Japan needed to end the embargos and the only way they saw to do that was to swiftly defeat the US.
Very true about sanctions, what if the Japanese had taken a different path. By that I mean leave China alone but attack the European colonies only? The British, Dutch, Portuguese, etc? The US would have had no reason until that point to apply for sanctions. The Japanese would have plenty oil, rubber, etc. If I was Japan at that point I could say basically I’m protecting my fellow Asians from evil Europeans, etc. Then if the Germans who at that point in ‘41 were still on the ascendant publicly said to America leave my buddy alone or else,would the President have enough support to go to war just to rescue Euros foreign assets?
@@sctm81 then compare with what the soviets did to japan in Manchuria. the Japanese army was bleeding elite troops by the hundreds of thousands in china starting from day one in 37
Very interesting presentation, thank you. I wonder how much U.S. Army General Stillwell’s incompetence (actually the Pentagon and Washington DC’s inattention to the problem) and British over-attention with India and it’s ultimately unsuccessful attempts to hold onto her pre-WW2 colonies contributed to the terrible power vacuum within China in 1945. A power vacuum that Mao so readily exploited.
I have been reading the comments and there seems to be some debate as to the meaning of ichigo. According to wiki the original characters for this are 一号作戦. The meaning I get from this is number one, but the feeling behind it is likely it's number one in a series of operations, not that this is number one in importance. So this one would be 一号作戦, then they would launch 二号作戦 and then 三号作戦 (1, 2, 3, etc)
I think this would be a perfect example to show a "win the battle, lose the war" scenario. And a good answer to "what if the Wehrmacht won this last-ditch offensive?"
Aside from the fact that we know how the Pacific War went, the Japanese are infamous for the “win a battle, lose a war” scenario. Almost from the beginning of their first offensive operations in the WWII era (as in start of the second Sino-Japanese War), the Japanese Empire displayed a severe short-sightedness and two dimensional thinking. They seemed to almost purely consider the short term tactical effect of their actions, while largely ignoring the long term strategic consequences. They very quickly let themselves get bogged down into a four front war (the four being in China, India/South Pacific, the US, and the “war” between the IJA and IJN).
They couldn't have a force meet them half-way from Vietnam? Hell, I'd sure up that juicy salient in the North and then see if I could take a juicy bite of them in the south provided I could affect some kind of build-up at that point in the war - no clue what Japanese shipping looked like but I have to assume a good portion of it was busy supplying of the bottom of the ocean by this point.
There is Mao's talk with the Japanese prime minister after the war where the Prime minister apologized and Mao said... no need, you guys did us communists a solid.
Has Justin written any books about this stuff? He does his homework and really like the videos that use him as a reference for ww2 in the pacific and it is refreshing to hear an updated perspective instead of the usual US-centric narrative. If he doesn't have any books, he should. Better yet he should make audiobooks of them cus I could listen to him talk about this stuff for hours.
Yeah, the map really isn't great. I wanted to use one from Hans van de Ven's book that is way better, but that may have been a copyright/usage issue so we had to settle for the crappy wiki map.
@Marry Christmas but northeast china has NEVER been called and has never been considered part of mongolia in china(and in japan),as chinese i can assure u that. So calling it mongolia is hilariously wrong.
I will be doing a chat specifically on Burma sometime down the line. I have only just started reading up on all the sources and I want to do it justice before I put something out there.
Please do a video regarding the Soviet invasion of Manchuria, Southern Sakhalin, and the Kuril Islands. Finding good English sources on that part of the war has been very difficult.
I have heard of this operation. It was a desperate attempt to finish ONE war (1: vs Chiang’s Nationalist Army, 2: vs Britain’s 14th Imperial Army led by General William Slim and 3a: United States General Douglas MacArthur and 3b: United States Admiral Chester Nimitz) allowing the Japanese to confront the remaining two opponents one at a time. As successful as Operation “ICHIGO” was however, Chiang would NOT give up or surrender. He just rounded up more conscripts and kept fighting.
And then, 3 months after ending war in Europe, Soviet Union declared war to Japan and liberated Manchuria and North Korea in less then 2 weeks. That operation demonstrated Deep Operation at it's best and was highly influential in Cold War military thought.
The Soviet invasion of Manchuria and the northern islands of Japan in 1945 was largely supplied by the USA, including most of the fuel via the route to Vladivostok, the vast majority of Soviet ships were American supplied for this purpose alone, and as for the The booming success of the armored divisions of the Red Army, the Japanese simply did not expect a Soviet attack and had made no preparations for that eventuality, and did not have a real air force in Manchuria.
@@DouglasMoran Yes, but agreement was made already in Teheran 1943 to solve Europe first and Soviet Union will join fight against Japan 3 months later. Piling of material started already in 1943.
@@SeismicHammer Operation took in account that Japan is lacking in tanks so it was planned as one large sweep against Quantung Army at full strength. By August '45 lot of Japanese forces were pulled and sent to other battlefields making operation easier.
I believe the Second Sino-Japanese War is about where the war on the Eastern Front was in the 50s; largely unknown and/or ignored by the west. As it was every bit as brutal and important, I'm hoping it's rediscovery and investigation is in the near future. Reading about the objectives of Operation Ichigo, it seems little more than a plan of desperation and almost certain failure (for even that time) on a scale that makes the Battle of the Bulge look like a military exercise.
![Noob To Max With DRAGON REWORK In Blox Fruits [FULL MOVIE]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/LnBMOinoOvA/mqdefault.jpg)
The Chinese Army may have been destroyed many times, but Chiang still has 10 million manpower in reserve... and another 20 million once he completes the counter-Inept Bureaucracy law and changed to Limited Conscription...
And once he got rid of Army Corruption his boys actually start fighting.
Blah b *SUBJUGATE THE WARLORDS*
What about if he spends 250 political power to get scraping the barrel? And can’t forget to set the economy to total mobilization.
@@Extraordinarylurker He want's to do the achievment no country for old man of course
Chiang Kai Shrek could’ve just invaded the southern warlords and killed Mao by 1937
This is probably the most influential World War II tale, I have experienced in the last few years.
How is a ww2 tale influential?
@@horrido666 Forgive Sofus' "influen[cy]". He hasn't experienced enough English yet.
@@horrido666 Since the Japanese could have diverted troops from China in 1944 to the Pacific or Burma instead of in Ichi-Go
The only video on RUclips that covers the China campaign non-generally.
Hello.
Agreed.
Hello.
Very enlightening
Would like to learn more about how CKS complied with the needs of his allies over China.
Worth noting that the Hengyang garrison which halted Ichigo for 47 days constituted one of Chiang's only remaining elite units -- the 10th Army Corps was fitted out with Soviet equipment from the 1938-1940 years. This was a veteran formation which partook in the 1st through 3rd Changsha Campaigns, and earned a reputation as the region's strongest combat unit. Yet even then by 1944 it found itself severely lacking in ammunition and was forced to rely on close-quarters combat.
Also comparing Chiang to late war Hitler is unfair. Chiang never believed in elastic defense in the first place =P
He did. Look up "magnetic warfare" . It wasn't elastic defence the German way because Chinese divisions had really bad mobility, but it was about luring the Japanese to move away from their supply bases into battles where Chinese units had been prepositioned in favorable positions. The first and second battles of changsha, which the Chinese won are good examples. Chiang kai shek undermined the execution by trying to micromanage it, but he has believed in the principle.
@RogerwilcoFoxtrot It also didn't help that Stilwell and Chiang hated each other more than the Japanese.
@@porksterbob From what I have looked into different battles of the Second Sino-Japanese war, there is a quite clear trend of the Chinese using a tactic of having the Japanese become bogged down in urban combat before the Chinese counter attack from the rear and behind against the supplies forcing the Japanese into a retreat. This was exactly what happened in Changsha's three battles, while additionally it was the Chinese tactic deployed by the Alpha force unites in the battle for Chihchiang airfield in western Hunan, and in Changde where the Japanese took the city but were forced to retreat after being encircled by the counter attack.
As a Taiwanese, I'm fairly certain that the absences of Operation Ichigo would only prolonged the civil war, but the defeat of Nationalist was inevitable since 1936, when Chiang was kidnapped during Xi'an incident. The simple truth is that CCP's ideology at the time was more appealing towards the general populations, which at the time was like 90% of farmers. Nationalist or Communist, the people didn't care who's on top, they only care who could give them land to farm and feed themselves.
Yeah, that is why I avoided making a declarative statement on that front since other factors were at play well beyond simple military issues. Ichigo certainly helped, perhaps significantly, but the CCP had other major advantages.
Unfortunately for them, the feeding themselves part didn't improve under the Communists, it actually got worse. Mao was very good at getting into power, but was very bad at actually using it in a productive way. But you are generally correct that the general Chinese populace wasn't very nationalistic at that time, though this did change later on.
@@SeismicHammer Quality of life did improve a lot from 1949 to 1956, but everything went off the rails afterwards. The CPC as a whole did a decent job of governing without Mao screwing everything up.
@@hailexiao2770 After 1949, quality of life increased because the war had ended and people could go back to their normal lives. Given that the policies set by Mao and his ruling party later caused severe famine in peacetime, how much of the improvement was due to the communist government is a bit hard to determine. Conditions in China drastically improved once the government allowed for more open entrepreneurship later on, so it seems that when left alone, the Chinese people are pretty good at building things up.
@@SeismicHammer Chinese people is never really nationalistic, the "patriotic" chinese you see nowadays are just a result of CCP playing with people's sence of inferiorty and ignorance.
MHV reduced to speechlessness . . . that's a new one! Great podcast from Justin.
Note on the map:
I know it is geographically challenged in parts. I wanted to use one from Hans van de Ven's book, but that might have brought up usage/copyright issues so we had to go with the open source wiki map. It does the job, but with a few bizarre errors.
Some detail related to the availability of sources:
The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) closely guards its archives, granting limited access to select historians. Not all PRC scholars are propagandists, though some certainly are. There are many historians in the PRC who legitimately do their best to push our understanding forward, but they must tread lightly. The work of these scholars is indispensable, as the snippets they provide from the CCP archives and other sources are all we are likely to get until the CCP either ceases to exist or radically opens up. Under Xi Jinping, we are seeing significant backsliding in academic freedom and the reinforcement of heavily propagandistic narratives.
With the collapse of Marshal Law on Taiwan in the late 1980s our access to wartime KMT records, and other critical resources such as Chiang Kai-shek's extensive diaries, has steadily increased. With it we have a much better understanding of the Nationalist war effort and the KMT in general. It can be a very heated topic as the KMT still continues to exist, at least in name, as one of the two major political parties in a now vibrant democracy. Therefore you get angry "greens" (Green Party or Green-aligned) that want to destroy any aspect of the KMT legacy and angry "blues" (KMT or KMT-aligned) working to whitewash or pump up the KMT.
As an example of how far we have come, I started reading the first extensive English-language biography of He Yingqin only a couple weeks ago. It complete overturns our previous assumptions about this important figure, often blown off as corrupt, incompetent, and inconsequential. It is based on extensive Chinese-language primary source research and plenty of work from historians on both sides of the Taiwan strait. It is an exciting time to be studying the history of China in this pivotal period!
Japanese records are a mixed bag. The Japanese (and Chinese) language is difficult, and this is made worse because written Japanese of the period used Kanji (borrowed Chinese characters) differently than modern written Japanese, adding an additional hurtle. The Japanese (along with some help from USAAF) destroyed large swaths of their military and other records at the end of the war, which limits our understanding.
Russian, British, American, German, etc. sources are also valuable and more materials (with the exception of the Russians) are coming available at a fairly steady pace.
CCP do have a bad reputation for opening its archives, but the Taiwan Regime is another interesting story. Basically the leading party now is using the advantage of bomb shelling archives to put their KMT "friends" into a political grave yard. Not saying it is a bad move, but using administrative means to attack a political enemy? emmm
Also Chiang Kai-shek's diaries is a joke, showing how a side swinging guy he was, and when you deep dive into even the KMT record, tons of errors can be found. In turns of quality Chiang's diaries are way worse than those of Manstein's/Guderian's.
It's a miracle that the CCP allowed a change in it's ww2 narrative that the KMT hardly did any fighting and were cooperating with the Japanese and that the CCP did all the fighting. They officially allow the narrative that the KMT did a big portion or a majority of the fighting along with the CCP. That they allow this recognition at all is a miracle and a major change to CCP propaganda.
@ We have discussed about this, and I clearly have gave you some new evidence. Also I have already pointed out CCP is doing a bad work.
@@zeitgeistx5239 Also welfare of former KMT soldiers has raised several times these years. Med care, pension, etc.
@ Also N1A is not so welcomed by residents in its sector. Rape, robbery, terror and corruption fully turned their reputation into a shithole.
The war in Asia and the Pacific is basically forgotten, thank you for bringing it back
Mostly East Asia
Pacific is far from forgotten (Midway, Pearl Harbor, Tora Tora Tora, etc etc etc)
No it's not.
The war in Asia was just as important as the one in Europe.
I think John Wayne would disagree that the War in the Pacific is forgotten.It isn’t but you’’re right about Burma and I’d add China.
@Tdan Kendros
No not really.
Both wars were equally important.
Only not of the allies.
For them the third Reich had more priority because it was much more dangerous for them.
But the second world war has kinda started in Asia in 1937.
(Atleast in my opinion)
@@kayvan671 forgotten means people don't talk about it, it is important.
Shouldn't be Manchuria (or Manchukuo) to the north-west of Korea? I am really suprised to see Mongolia there.
That might be referring to the Inner Mongolia region of China (Portions of Northern and Northeastern China) That, or the map has some geographical concerns.
@@tfit6766 I know Inner Mongolia, but it is not there either. Moreover it doesn't have a border with Korea.
It's due to plate tectonics. 😝
@Amanda B If it is wrong, it is wrong. No way around it.
@Amanda B Calm down luv.
Jokes on you because I’ve heard of this operation before. Seriously though, this was a very good and informative video.
Yeah, me too. Let's sue for false advertising. I suffered severe emotional trauma from the disappointment. ✌
I think they think Japan's screw up in China was more important than it actually was. It was a side show, at best - a fool's move by foolish politicians. Compare this pissant fighting to what was going on in Europe just a few years later. And Europeans participated in the Geneva Convention (for the most part).
Same I heard of the operation. CLiCKbaIT! RIOT!
I agree with you, good video but why just assume that "you never heard of"whatever I put in my next post.seems condescending.
Thanks!
10:40 I love the term Yolo-Offensive. sounds so proffessional! xD
@Big Bill O'Reilly you realize it's a joke right
Same as Ardennes offensive (battle of the bulge) xd
AMAZING VIDEO!!! another forgotten theater of WW2 is the Burma Campaign!! hope you make a video about that
Yes. Fascinated by that campaign as well
@@somalikanye8642 Largest volunteer army ever gets formed in that theater.
Over 300,000 Japanese troops were stationed there
Bullet-Tooth Tony And another 140,000 from Coalition troops.
@@Cotswolds1913 that would be another 2 bloody years had that field army been freed up to bolster the island hopping campaign
I was wondering why it seemed familiar, but then said to myself "that's Operation Ten-Go you're thinking of".
5:45 Rationale.
12:00 Operations.
24:00 Aftermath.
Excellent! There is a paucity of information on the later stages of the Second Sino Japanese war both in books and on RUclips. I can get behind more of these videos. Keep me coming!
I have read this Japanese offensive from the Time-Life WW2 collection maybe 30 years ago, but seriously this is the first time i heard it again since that....very good guys well done 🤗
Justin is an amazing guest. Knowledgable, articulate, funny, and humble. The war in the Pacific is so misunderstood (including by me!). Great to see this content.
An informative video on a virtually unknown operation in an forgotten theatre of the war.
Fantastic work as always.
22:09
Yeah, because China has the 'Great Wall' great wonder, so it gives all cities the benefit of a wall free of cost.
Unfortunately, Gunpowder units ignore fortifications bonuses.
@@dse763 Indeed (obsolete)
Boy would Japan have been in for a rude shock if they attacked India and that vicious warmonger Gandhi and his nuclear doomsday arsenal.
Well, The Great Wall was not really useful for more than one thousand years. Chinese cities used to have city walls surrounding them. No, they were not useful once the Chinese invented gunpowder. The Mongols first (?) used to breached city walls all the way to Europe.
This offensive is the biggest segment of the war I never heard of before, especially given its effects on the outcome of the Chinese Civil War.
I also never header about an offensive of such a scale. No one really explained to me why the nationalists had stronger forces, but communists won, or why nationalists forces took more casualties than communists when fighting Japan. Heard something about the Burma road and thats it.
But its in the communist mindset to expand revolution, where capitalist wars destroyed societies materially and morally. Lenin got to power thanks to Germany winning the war with Russia. Hitler was Stalins "icebreaker of revolution". So no surprises that Mao took power the way he did.
I have more than one book that refers to operation Ichi Go was the fifth, last and largest of the "Rice offensives." One of the major goals was to capture that autumn's rice harvest so as to feed Japan. Justin mentions the famine afflicting China, but fails to mention that a large part of that famine were the actions of the Japanese army.
Zacharye Sheehan The food problematic in Asia isnt tackled often in the western literature.
Japan was close to starvation in 1945 due to the destruction of its merchant fleet which brought the food from mainland Asia
I simply didn't have time. Mitter, van de Ven, and others go into great deal regarding Japanese economic warfare against China. None of the sources I have, including Drea (the English-language's leading IJA historian), mention seizing crops as one of the core objectives of Ichigo. However, it wouldn't surprise me in the least if that were an objective, and given that IJA units were ordered to live off the land it was already implicitly going to happen.
Excellent video, MHNV. A bit of WWII history which I didn't know. Excellent channel.
Couple of things
1. Communist bases area in Northern China has being established since 1938 to 1940, however, these area have between constantly subjected to constant "counter-insurgency" efforts of both the Japanese and puppet Wang Jingwei government that involve killing entire village, burning of crop during harvest time and destroying irrigation in areas suspected of supporting the communists. Thus bases has being contained and declining after especially severe campaigns in 1942 and 1943. These effort disappeared in 1944, which give the communist breathing room to shore up those areas.
2. Wang Jingwei's "alternative" KMT forces is completely ignored in your analysis, however, their strength is quite significant. I believe by the war's end there is still ~500k to be collected and disbanded, and during its height the number is well over a million. However, they are mostly assigned to security duties and fighting mainly against the communist as they are deemed to be unreliable when fighting against their fellow KMT.
3. The archives in China are hardly seal, you can always file requests and unless you’re touching top secret stuff, they usually approved rather quickly. If you don’t want to go through the complex procedures, you can always access the already published stuff, which there is tons of. For example, tax and financial records of communist rear areas in northern china was published in the 1980s.
You can find them here, though none of them are translated:
books.google.com/books?id=yrYbAQAAMAAJ
books.google.com/books?id=521bAAAAIAAJ
books.google.com/books?id=ce5sAAAAIAAJ
There is also selected records of combat actions reports from Shanxi/Hebei/Central Inner Mongolia region.
books.google.com/books?id=ARdIAAAAMAAJ
One person you could contact is 萨苏, he is a Chinese who (used to?) live in Japan that famous for written books (《国破山河在》、《尊严不是无代价的》、《突破缅北的鹰》、《退后一步是家园》) of the war by comparing war records from both the Chinese and Japanese achieve, with special focus on air war and armored warfare. However, his recent book are on organized crime in the late Qing, early republic, and British HK so not sure if he’s still interested in the subject.
His weibo is here
blog.sina.com.cn/u/1197950454
First of all, great post!
Indeed, there is more available from the PRC than people assume, with some great scholars contributing to the literature, but there is still a lot that is held back for obvious reasons and access to archives are used as a weapon against any scholars the CCP deems "hostile."
I couldn't comment on the forces of the puppet troops beyond my one mention because they are almost completely ignored in the English literature, which is all I have access to unfortunately. I know they were there and used against the communists and in the rear areas, but their story has yet to be told in English beyond the most superficial of mentions. Discussion of Reorganized Nationalist China in English is generally limited to the higher political level, with a couple of works I know of looking broadly at collaboration, but not from a military perspective. Some social histories and such are floating around as well IIRC.
The response of the Japanese to the hundred regiments offensive and the devastating effect it had on the communists in North China is too often ignored by the ccp friendly histories.
The ccp attacked the Japanese in force one time. And the response was as devastating to the communists as ichigo was to the nationalists so the communists stopped directly fighting Japan after 1940 unless forced. (With good reason)
It's only recently that the ccp has been willing to admit that the kmt did most of the fighting.
@@porksterbob porksterbob if you actually read official military history I. China (ones published by PLA press for example), you'll find that counter counter-insurgency experiences from 1940 onwards is featured heavily in military history studies and a center piece in development of PLA doctrines on both strategic and tactical level all the way to the 1980s. (Commonly refered to People's War in the west)
Second, PRC has never downplayed NRA efforts in official history studies, it is the defeats are given far more attention than victories. The only difference in recent decades the blame for the KMT failure are falls more on strategic failure, rivalries and inefficiencies with in the NRA rather than just blame everything on ideology, corruption and indifference.
However, in popular media, there are more movies and TV shows glorifying the CCP war effort than KMT, with more Pro-KMT show in the last few years compared to before. But that's expected, how show glorifying the Red Army that Hollywood makes for every saving private Ryan and band of brother out there, even though the Soviets did most of the fighting against the Germans. The only one I can think of is Enemy at the the gates, which basically speak for itself. At China did justice in the Tai'ezhuang movie, and that movie came out in 1986.
ruclips.net/video/QQXxo4Kp9Es/видео.html
@@WangGanChang expecting the US to give equal shrift to non Americans is a stretch. For China, the official narrative until the 80s was that the ccp did most of the fighting against Japan.
It's like how most people today think Mao ended the unequal treaties, when they were actually ended in 1942,1943, and 1946.
My father was an advisor to the Nationalist forces during the war in particular to a Nationalist Artillery Battalion. Dad never spoke of the war and the story was related to me by his assistant in 1959. The battalion was equipped with US pack 75mm howitzers. When the Japanese struck the battalion began an orderly withdrawal but then the commander and his staff got scared and bolted. Within four hours the rest of battalion took all the horses except dad's and Sergeant Jackson's and left without spiking the guns or destroying the ammunition. It was left to dad and Sergeant Jackson to do that. They got finished and were just crossing the crest of a hill when the Japanese reached the guns. Sergeant Jackson said they had only gone about 100 yards down the hill when the explosion occurred effectively putting a halt to Japanese advance in their area for a couple of hours. There were several very hair raising moments as they withdrew. When I was finally got dad to talk about it the one thing he said that stood out was the number of Japanese that seemed to suddenly appear. Really enjoyed this about the forgotten theater of war.
Your dad was a dumba** for helping the Chinese.
You talking about Communists vs Nationalsts, but the main thing is that the IJA one upped the Navy.
One upped? More like uncontested. China had no navy after Shanghai in 1937
@@GeneralLiuofBoston1911 He means the Japanese army one upped the Japanese navy.
@@GeneralLiuofBoston1911 what the commenter is meaning is the IJA had an operational success with an all-out offensive. Meanwhile, the Navy’s last all-out operation - Sho-Go 1 - was an almost complete failure. And since the IJA and IJN had been locked in a cold war/small scale civil war for a couple of decades by this point, it was a major domestic victory for the IJA as well.
@@Engine33Truck Even then it was uncontested. The Japanese Navy in 1944-1945 was on its last legs. Yes the Japanese Army was rather weakened and didn't hold up the same prowess as it did in the earlier stages of the war, but they still managed to mobilize, which is something that the IJN couldn't achieve to the same extent, nor to the same level of success in terms of victories. But in the end, the Japanese Army's southern offensives ended poorly as a result since although major strategic areas were gained, it left the army unable to launch another, especially after the Soviet Union entered the war and poured into Manchuria.
Alright,Your guest just might be one of the best researchers on the tube along with Richard Frank for the Sino-Japanese part of the Pacific War.,and has thus far given your channel the best account of this offensive..
Mao Zedong would've been a good "Risk" board game player . . . That's not necessarily a compliment.
0:21 I prefer to translate it as "Operaton Strawberry"
Excellent podcast!
I've been curious about one aspect of the war, that I can't seem to find any info on.
When Italy entered the war in 1940, I'm aware that they tangled with the British on the modern day borders of Lybia and Egypt, as well as in the Horn of Africa with Somaliland and around Ethiopia. Documentation about Italy's combat against French forces on the Alpine line and in Corsica are also available, however I can't seem to find any details about combat between French and Italian forces in North Africa on the Lybian-Tunisian border prior to the instalment of the Vichy Regime, which ended their hostilities.
Could you please perhaps shed some light on this topic in an upcoming video?
Given the lack of mention of any hostilities anywhere, I wouldn't have assumed there were any...
@@randomguy-tg7ok also given the short amount of time the French were in the war (at that point ofc) and the lack of any real incentive for the Allies to overrun Libya at this point in the war
There's a channel called TIK which is very keen on the north African campaign, he may have posted something suitable?
Its kinda hilarious that this map switches Mongolia and Manchuria XD
🤦♂️
This is one of the best world war II informative discussions that I have heard in a long time. I wish you would have taken much longer and in more detail. Would love to hear more on this
its an interesting conclusion and one which shouldnt be ignored, particularly the lack of allied support in those first years... its a recurring theme
I have actually heard of Ichi-go aka "Last Throw". It appeared in "A Historical Atlas of WW2". Don't know if anybody else has ever heard of that book.
I think I have that book actually. Read it when I was in middle school.
Terrence Eustache does the book has the name of the author?
it is "one" or "number one"
When history channel used to actually talk about history, they talked about this. So yeah, i've heard of this, but nice to get some more details.
6:43 "What other type of thinking would you (as the Japanese command) would you be doing at this point?" Thoughts of surrender seem a reasonable answer.
Well yeah, but this is Imperial Japan we are talking about.
No, if I'm an Imperial Japanese commander I would not be considering surrender because the culture I would have been raised in would have taught me that surrender is genuinely not an option and that victory is assured.
You always, *always* need to take context into account with this kind of thing. In some cases, cultural values and views can drastically change how people will react. I'm not saying that I approve of Imperial Japan's culture; I think any culture that can create as horrific an event as the rape of Nanjing is awful and quite frankly terrifying. But we do need to understand that that culture was there in Japan at that time and that it shaped what people believed and the values they held.
Several senior officers were assassinated for considering surrender by more fanatical junior officers. This continued to the end with the plot to kill the Emperor himself to prevent surrender.
No complete Japanese unit surrendered , for most world war 2 armies 1 man surrendered for every 3 killed . With Japan this leaps out to 1 surrender per 140 deaths .
Considering the Japanese Emperor had to send family members delivering messages to certain isolated units in the Pacific to convince them that his decision to surrender was legitimate, surrender wasn’t really on their minds.
I guess I need to learn about this subject more! Excellent work!
It seems worth pointing out that while, yes, US policy was to keep Nationalist China in the war "on the cheap," there also just wasn't a whole lot more that could have been done if they'd wanted to. Between Japanese control over the coastal areas and the Himalayas blocking landward access to China from India, there simply wasn't a good way to get materials or forces into China.
*Perhaps* the Western Allies could have made the CBI theater, and re-opening the Burma Road, a higher priority. But terrain, distance, and weather limited the size and effectiveness of forces that could be employed in that theater, even if additional forces could have been released from other theaters. So even that doesn't seem like a sure thing - and I can't, off the top of my head, think of a lot of other ways the Western Allies could have helped Nationalist China.
I wonder......
FDR, was a bigot and hated ASIANS.
Churchill, will.....
We know he was no better.
Not was there very much left,
With the other campaigns having a priority.
I will give a great deal of the blame to FDR. His lack of vision as well not having any historical or cultural knowledge of China. Doomed the Chinese.
@@knutdergroe9757 it wasn't fdr. It was stilwell and Marshall. Fdr gets responsibility for putting them in, but those two were the ones who fucked over the kmt.
Yep. It just wasn't that important to the US, or the British, since they knew that the days of world empire were coming to an end. It makes me sad that most Americans still see the Japanese as near sighted fanatical bonzai charging jungle warfare experts, when in reality they were a strongly mechanized professional army, the kind that were rarely experienced in the Island hopping campaign. It wasn't until Yamashita's defense of the Philippines that the US really understood that the war on the land was just as important as the war at sea, and even more bloody.
@@princeofcupspoc9073 I've never actually understood the disdain that most Americans (in less history passionate circles) show towards the Japanese war efforts (and specifically anything related to sacrificing oneself on the field of battle)
That's the point the historians make. They don't suggest that the Western Allies should have done more, they just note that they didn't. China was a low-priority theatre and whenever Chinese theatre concerns bumped up against the concerns of another theatre, China lost every time. That was totally fine from the perspective of the Western Allies fighting a global war, but that fact didn't make it any easier on the Chinese. It also makes late and post-war claims that China "wasn't fighting" even more disgusting. Promises made to the Chinese by the western allies were repeatedly broken, the largest of which being a massive operation to retake Burma (including amphibious landings and massive naval support). It was promised and then killed as the resources were needed elsewhere. Was that justifiable in the global context? Yes. Was it still a broken promise that hurt China specifically? Yes.
Chiang wanted to use the Y Force that was being send to Yunnan to hold off the Japanese, but stupid Stilwell said no just to avenge his humiliation in Burma. Chiang from the being told him NOT to engage the Japanese in a set battle cause the Chinese Expeditionary Force was form with most of the elite units china had and COMPLETELY irreplaceable. So when Ichigo was underway there went THE ONLY FORCE that could have stop the Japanese into Burma where the C.B.I. can handle by themselves.
Oh trust me, the next (impromptu) part of this discussion is coming soon and is basically 25 minutes of me ripping Stilwell a new asshole.
bullshit
Any Chinese that grows up in mainland China should know this (under a different name) if they pay any attention in the history class. I still remember reading about this in middle school history book. I especially like to read the part about the siege of HengYang. I admire the bravery, tenacity and resilience of the KMT soldiers. They are my heroes. On the Internet, there are still many articles talking about the 1944 defensive at HengYang, of course mainly in the Chinese language. Many people from the west never heard of it because the west media is not interested in it. The media always tries to cover what the public cares or values. In this sense, the fact that not many people from west ever heard of the 1944 Japanese offense symbolizes how the west in general undervalues the contributions of the Chinese people during and before WW2 (to the Chinese people, WW2 started from 1931).
Jagdtiger How are the Flying Tigers covered in PRC text books. US Army Aviators before World War II resigned their commissions and travelled to China to fly US fighter planes that the US supplied the Chinese military. Americans were shooting down Japanese military aircraft before World War II. 😐😐😐😐😐😐😐
Yes, they are brave souls, yet KMT betrayed them so completely
@@John77Doe we do have lots of historical books and references about general Chennault and his brave air fighters , their accomplishments were not forgotten. I can still recall a picture I saw in my secondary school history class that displays a young Chinese guard standing next to a giant Curtis p40 fighter with a shark jaw painted on its head. It was very impressive. There is also a flying tiger memorial museum in Zhijiang ,Huaihua where once located the headquarter of AVG during WII.
@@西方负典编译组 One of the Flying Tiger fighter pilots survived the air combat missions and brought crispy fried Chinese noodles as a snack back to the USA. After flying a combat mission against the Japanese, upon landing, his Chinese ground crew would bring him hot tea and crispy fried Chinese noodles. After World War II, when he returned to civilian life, he opened up a factory in the US to make crispy fried Chinese noodles as a snack. When I was a boy in the late 1960's, you could still buy them in US grocery stores along side potato chips and pop corn. I suppose, you can google it. 😐😐😐😐😐😐😐
Agreed, The country needs the credit they are due for WW2. China has my blessings.
Glad to see a video on this. It's surprising how little attention is given to an operation of this scale, though less surprising I suppose given the similar amount of inattention to major Soviet operations of the Second World War with respect to how much attention the operations of the Western Allies receive.
The defeat of Germany took "English brain, American brawn, and Russian blood" The Russians lost almost as many people at Stalingrad (~900,000) as the USA (~400,000) and UK (550,000-585,000) combined for the entire war.
Deine/Eure Videos sind so informativ. Vielen vielen Dank für die harte Arbeit!
Love these videos and the use sources.
Another massive and largely unknown campaign was the Soviet invasion of Manchuria in 1945. Arguably this was just as an important factor in the Japanese surrender as the atomic bombs.
Wow, mind blowing. I am 60 (over) yo, and finally starting to understand "Who Lost China?" question, and, even hearing an answer. Really enjoyable, and enlightening. I guess I am growing up....many thanks!!!! love this channel....
Great video, I would like to see more on what happens next
23:45 The Mighty Jingles-fandom confirmed! ^^
BTW I absolutely love Justin's* professional look at the topic and his narration style and voice!
* Please credit him in every video - I don't know his last name or what his professional background is.
His twitter account is shown, you can find his full name etc. there; nowadays I think I usually add the full name Justin Pyke.
@@MilitaryHistoryNotVisualized Danke! Habe ich wohl überlesen. :)
Wow. The things that don't end u p in the history books...
It is a campaign that every Chinese knows: 豫湘桂会战。
Yeah, you tend to remember a war that killed about 25,000,000 people and paved the way for Mao Zedong (arguably a worse fate)
@@Legitpenguins99 I mean he killed over 60 million In a few years Insane
@@Legitpenguins99 arguably not. mao's rule has two major disasters of course, but there were positives, for instance, it unified the country under a strong central government and whatever you think of them, it was far less corrupt than the nationalist in 44,45. by 1950, china was considered a major power though its show of force in the korean war, having dealt the longest retreat of a regular army unit in all us history, though china was only really a power player in near by areas due to a lack power projection capabilities, non the less base on those two things, an slight improvement in relations with the west was all it took to acquire the unsc permanent seat from the kmt in the 70s. now you could argue that the kmt, had it won the civil war, may have lead to a better china today, but thats not a given it could very well have lead to a worse china, like an even worse version of india today
@@kstreet7438 that estimate is based on faulty math. its almost a given that the famine killed at least a few million. but the 45-60 million number is a bad estimate based on what the growth rate was before the famine and what the actual population was after the famine and taking the difference as the number "killed" this completely ignores things like people having fewer children due to.... idk.... famine? people having no children due to dying of starvation(they would count as killed but the bad estimate counts their non-existent children as killed as well). in a modern example, those estimates would literally equate things like getting a vasectomy to killing like 2 kids(depending on general growth rate of the nation).
An exageration. I'm chinese and im sure MOST of the people don't know. Why lie to foreigners?Whatever your motive is, lying just looked stupid to me.
Thanx for this video.
Ichigo also means 'Strawberry', イチゴ
lol wat
in this case it should be 一号作戦, or no 1 battle plan. so it might signify the importance they attach to it
It's a homophone, but is spelled with different kanji (Chinese characters). Hence, different words. Although "Operation Strawberry" is pretty damn amusing. 🤣🤣🤣
@@MilitaryHistoryNotVisualized I misunderstood it as operation fifteen or one five. 一五
I think would be better to write operation number one (ichi-go) in English. They pronounced almost the same so can't be helped when talking. Same with the strawberry.
Thanks to the video. I knew there was an operation there from a game War in the Pacific, but i had no details or even know the name.
Wow
Good informative talk on a front that's hard to get history about in the West. Thanks for that. Military History Not Visualized is a good name for your channel though, as 30+ minutes looking at the same map is a great way to use RUclips like the 100 year old technology called radio. But I did listen to the whole thing anyway because it's excellent, and your summation in the end about China's experience at the end of the war compared to the other powers of the Big 4 was spot on!
Most Excellent Research!!! 😉
Operation Ichi-Go is an operation conducted by the Japanese Army on the Chinese mainland from April 17th to December 10th, 1944 during the Sino-Japanese War.
It was the last major offensive of the Japanese Army, which caused the National Revolutionary Army to be hit hard and affected during the Chinese Civil War. However, on the other hand, the United States is also mediating the conclusion of the Double Tenth Agreement with Chiang Kai-shek in order to avoid a civil war.
According to a study by Barbara W. Tuchman, the results of this operation had a more significant impact on the subsequent war situation than the Japanese had imagined, and had a decisive impact on Japan's fate. According to it, Franklin Roosevelt has consistently strongly trusted and supported Chiang Kai-shek since the beginning of the war, and encouraged him in the war against Japan so that he would not drop out of the Allies in a single peace with Japan during the Cairo Conference. However, he said that he changed his mind because the front of Chiang Kai-shek collapsed due to this operation. In fact, Chiang Kai-shek has not been invited to important Allied conferences ("Yalta Conference" and "Potsdam Conference") since then.
According to the Stilwell document, Roosevelt said, "Can China win?" Stilwell said, "There is no choice but to eliminate Chiang Kai-shek." During the 1944 Hengyang battle, he could not sleep at night and twice. He says he thought about suicide. The American side also planned to assassinate Chiang Kai-shek, and three methods of "poisoning", "aircraft incident", and "pretending to be suicide" were considered, but it was canceled in 1944 due to changes in the international situation such as Burma. The successor that the United States envisioned is Sun Fountain.
As Roosevelt's Chief of Staff George Marshall and General Joseph Stilwell have long insisted, Chiang Kai-shek's army is actually a demoralized and corrupt organization that does not form an army. It became clear that he had no desire or ability to fight with the United States and other Allied forces.
As a result, President Roosevelt changed the scenario of the operation against Japan from the conventional bombing of Japan and other countries from the air bases of mainland China to the one that MacArthur and others claimed to occupy the islands of the Pacific Ocean one after another.
China was dismissed at the Yalta Conference, and the Allied nation's footsteps were disturbed, with angry Chiang Kai-shek presenting a peace plan to Japan against the will of the United States.
The Japanese Operation Ichi-Go attack left the National Revolutionary Army with 750,000 casualties. This caused the Kuomintang to lose to the Communist Party in the civil war. China would not have been dominated by the dictatorship Communist Party if it had made peace with Japan and cooperated in protecting it from communism.
Tucuman is not a reliable source.
Very informative video. You are correct in that this isn't really talked about, I learned a lot just from the description never-mind the video. Thank you!
excellent enjoyed it
Wow excellent topic and presentation
Re 11:30 (sum kind of negotiated settlement with japan)
The war with japan did not end unconditionally, despite all the unconditional surrender rhetoric.
D. M. Giangreco's Hell to Pay sheds some light on the subject.
Worth also pointing out that the strategic goal of opening a land route for resource flow from the SRA through China seems pretty questionable. The Japanese had such a lousy record in terms of engineering efforts that I don't see how they could have created a road - let alone a rail - network to allow any sort of efficient resource flow. The Burma Railroad took 1.5 years to build, using materials scrounged from infrastructure elsewhere in occupied DEI and Malaysia and made extensive use of POWs as labor and still only managed a throughput barely enough to supply Japanese troops in Burma in the end.
Yeah, it was a pipe dream that never panned out. Predictably.
Great upload, China had been a battleground for ages against Japan with barely any assistance from the Allies. Meanwhile out in Europe, the Eastern Front, the Mediterranean Theaters, that's where all the resources of the Allies went to.
The Allies assisted China by destroying Japans navy and bombing its mainland to a pulp.
@@jakewoolard9373 Destruction of the Japanese navy didn't happen until late 1944 with Leyte Gulf. Heavy bombing of mainland Japan didn't happen until the very late stages of the war. The Second Sino-Japanese War started in 1937. The only real support from the Allies to Japan was mainly from the United States, and even then, more of the US aid went elsewhere. Everyone else was "thoughts and prayers."
The United States military did not have to deal with much of the Imperial Japanese Army... The bulk of the army was in China, Southeast Asia, or in Japan itself.
@@Warmaker01 I feel like you're ignoring some key parts of why they didn't help, which is that the allies were also busy. The 2nd Sino-Japanese war (and WW2 esentially) started in 1937, but the USA didn't join until December 1941, and they were able to start bombing Japan only once their air bases were close enough to do so, despite the fact that there had been and would continue to be smaller bombing missions in China. Same thing with the "late" destruction of the Japanese Navy, which they were destroying bit by bit in various battles between 1942 and 1944.
The USSR had come to a truce with Japan after Khalkin Gol and then went to battle after they had finished dealing with the Nazis, because logically that's where all their resources went (you can't ask them to help you fight Japan thousands of kilometres away when they have a real problem of their own and have a truce with them).
The British and French were busy since 1939 in Europe and North Africa but they were at peace with Japan at the time until the japs declared war on them some time later, in which France and Britain lost horribly because of the sudden attack. Also, the British Raj was an active frontline of the war until the very end of it, so again, it's hard to deviate resources from India to China in that regard.
You're ignoring the context of the war, it would be the same as me saying that it was very mean for China to not send aid to fight in the Western Front of WW1.
Part of the Operation was also based in Burma. They were making a huge push into India. Resulted in the battle of Kohima and subsequent defeat.
U-Go was a separate operation, but timing was linked to my understanding. I will be doing a chat specifically on Burma sometime down the line. I have only just started reading up on all the sources and I want to do it justice before I put something out there. I definitely want to avoid talking about Burma/India alongside something like Ichigo, because I feel strongly that it should get its own "time in the Sun." Think this chat, but with brief mention to China (basically, that Ichigo was happening) and way more on Burma.
i knew i can always trust MHV and justin to do this part of history justice. most people i see talk about WW2 china usually favor either nationalist or the communist in their narrative, with english speaking side favoring nationalist the most and chinese speaking side favoring communist most. and you guys navigated that mine field like nobody's business.
on a side note, i always think the nationalist and the communist's tactic supplemented each other better than their alliance itself. i can imagine it being a nightmare for IJA officer trying to adapt to enemy with 2 drastically different methods, where focusing on one would leave opening for the other.
Thanks! I do try, but it is tough. One thing I didn't bring up in the video, but I have been thinking about more and more, is that the whole "who did more" debate is entirely asinine and ultimately pointless. One major advantage the CCP had over the KMT was that they could resist Japan AND build strength for the civil war with the same actions. Base areas and party infrastructure that was developed during the War of Resistance undermined and hurt the Japanese, but they didn't disappear with the Japanese surrender. The CCP was able to turn them on the KMT. The KMT on the other hand had to choose, because they were fighting predominately, but not exclusively, as a conventional force. A division thrown against the Japanese hurt the Japanese, but it was one more unit that would be chewed up before being used against the communists. The way the CCP rebuilt, expanded, and fought was exceptionally smart for the context.
It also should be noted that like the hollowing out of the KMT, the IJA in China went from the elite of the IJA in the 1930s to a husk of it's former self. With elite units before shipped out to fight WW2 and heavy units had all their equipment shipped out to replacement loses in the Pacific. So while the IJA is in a better shape than the KMT but they both lived off the land by 1944. By 1944 the IJA in China was largely living off the land as Japanese logistics become almost none existent as Japanese shipping collapsed. Japanese industrial capability was heavily damaged by B-29 raids to the extent that B-29s ran out of targets with firebombing wiping out majority of Japanese cities. The Japanese logistics situation was so bad in Vietnam in mid 1944 that one Japanese freighter captain refused to take Allied POWs to the mainland as he told them the waters were so full of US submarines that you could walk on them.
Zeitgeist X And in Guadacanal they're still trying to reserve forces for China campaign.
Heavy ally bombing started in early 1945, largely Japanese industries were not damaged at all around Ichigo time.
Ichigo received top priority per logistics as introduced in this video anyway.
This is exactly what a RUclips history channel should do.
been waiting for this video
Shock and awe. I'd never heard a peep of this. I had wondered, without aid of even a story, why the US wasn't bombing Japan from China. Now its obvious.
You guys, and others on utube are expanding history. Thanks
1944:
Finland: (switched sides)
Romania: (switched sides)
Bulgaria: (switched sides)
Italy: (most of it has surrendered a full year ago)
Hungary: "Germany hlp pls?"
Croatia: "Shyt, Tito's partisans are coming with a vengance"
Germany: "LEEROY JENKINS!" (gets horribly murdered in Belarus and France)
Japan: (while taking a beating in the Pacific) "I'M ABOUT TO PULL OFF WHAT THEY CALL A PRO GAMER MOVE!"
A RUclipsr going into the Asian theatre for more than 2 minutes? Amazing.
Could you do a video on the 100 Regiments Offensive? I heard of it being a major turning point in the war where the CCP engaged in direct combat for the first time in the war on a large scale, but never saw an analysis for how this changed the theatre or Japanese strategy specifically
Thank you for this video. I knew very little about this.
Excellet content. I learned a lot
I remember reading about how this was partly the fault of Chennalt's over confidence in the air Corps ability to protect and assist the Chinese in the destruction of the Japanese. He persuaded Roosevelt to direct more resources to the Air Forces over the hump and less for land forces under Stillwell.
Still well and the ground forces didn't have the supplies they needed to counter Japan and the Air Force could not deliver on Chennalt's rosy visions with destroying the enemy.
I love Chennalt, but he was wrong about his predictions about air power.
That final quotation was powerful and awareness raising.
One of the reasons the allies didn't fight this as much as you would think is because it removed a lot of troops that could have been used to defend the home Islands with no easy way to get them back. This was before the atomic bombs were built so military planners had to consider an invasion. Look at it as a much bigger piece of the wither on the vine strategy where not every island occupied by the Japanese was invaded just by passes and left to wither.
As you said it was 7 years into the War, losing most industrial cities, so the ability of replenishing troops was nightmare. While corruption was common, I don't think loss of Kogo 1should be blamed on army corruption. I recalled KMT blamed it on Stilwell for "mis-allocation" of resource into Burma. Meanwhile Chang had his problem in replenishing his troops which tended to favour his own loyal KMT troops instead of "warlord" troops or worse Communist troops who on paper was reporting to Chang on common enemy Japan. Warlord commander had to fight on the notion that they had to find their own re-supply, which during early days go WW2, commanders had the concept that if their division strength was down to 2000 strong, they were demoted to brigade commander (hence the Han execution)
Much appreciated, this is such a terribly under served area of WW2 history. And yep I had never heard about it.
Thanks!
It’s not forgotten. Very few Westerners cared. US and British was in planning and execution of Operation Overlord, and 3 millions of Germans and 6 millions of Russians were still slugging out in Eastern Front.
Intresting video - good information
@3:18 "that China was to be maintained in the war at minimum costs"
Supplying China was expensive. The Japanese cut the Burma Road in 1942 and the replacement Ledo Road didn't reach China until January 1945. From 1942 on, the primary supply route was flying cargo planes over "The Hump", and even after the Leo Road opened, The Hump was still the primary supply route with the road augmenting it. So many planes were lost flying The Hump that it became know as "The Aluminum Highway" (for all the visible crashed planes).
If I remember correctly, almost all the supplies being flown in supported the US forces, primarily the Air Corps, initially fighters (The Flying Tigers) and later bombers and eventually B-29s to strike Japan. At the end of their flights, the cargo planes could be within range of Japanese fighter planes and USAAC fighter protection was essential to keeping losses from becoming unsustainable (air frames and air crews).
Q: Any sense of what the author (Rana Mitter, Forgotten Ally: China's World War II, 1937-1945) thought the Allies could have done to get more supplies to the KMT armies?
Not have Stilwell intentionally withholding large sums of it as a form of coercion for starters. It also goes beyond supply and toward numerous broken allied promises to the Chinese. They had reasons to break them, good reasons in many cases, but they were broken just the same. Whenever the Chinese theatre concerns came up against the concerns of another theatre in the global war, China lost every time. Again, for good reasons from the Allied perspective, but the Chinese were left out to dry all the same. That is what he and other historians mean by minimum cost. China was not a primary theatre in the global war. Rightfully from a broad allied perspective, but that didn't help the KMT any. They were a junior allied partner, and were treated as such. No historian I have read suggests the allies should have dropped everything to pour resources into CBI, they just point out the reality of the situation.
Not mess up the defense of Burma in the first place.
Stilwell's leadership changed what could have been a minor defeat into a catastrophic strategic loss.
Stilwell pushed for Chinese and commonwealth forces to be positioned 100 miles closer to Japanese forces than they needed to be.
Stilwell had a "hunch" (his words) that the Japanese were weak a month after the Japanese had gone through malaya like a buzz saw and defeated the British in Rangoon and sittang bridge.
Stilwell's plan was for the Chinese under American command to work with British, Indian, Australian, and Burmese troops under British command to conduct a coordinated elastic defense followed by a counter offensive.
That is insane. We know how much trouble British and French forces had coordinating during the Battle of France with months to prepare. Or the amount of coordination problems between the Americans and the British in 1944 with years to prepare.
Stilwells plan required flawless coordination of troops from six nations under three different commands with no history of working together against superior forces with better training and equipment.
Of course it doesn't work and Stilwell blames the Chinese and the British for messing up his plan.
Had the allies tried what the British and the Chinese had initially suggested (you know the guys who have experience fighting Japan) they would have ceded southern Burma, built a defensive line just south of mandalay, and bought time for Chinese troops to arrive and fortify themselves as well as sort out communication issues. It may still have gone wrong, but they only have to hold from March until May when the summer monsoon makes all offensive action impossible.
If the allies hold North Burma in 1942, it becomes much, much safer and cheaper to supply China from India. (the arakan mountains are much lower than the himalayas) and much easier to kick the Japanese out of Burma entirely.
The Japanese only went for the full occupation of Burma in 1942 they couldn't believe their luck in being able to surround, defeat, and destroy all of the allied forces in southern Burma.
Japan hit the right people except for the US. With their strong navy they knew China couldn’t be helped by sea. A What If? question is if they’d said to the US we won’t touch a thing of yours, or Australia and NZ but we’ll kick the Europeans out of Asia how would things have gone?
Germany wouldn’t have declared war on the US when it did. The US wouldn’t have had the political will to grow so quickly militarily. They could sit it out but feed machines to Russia and GB at great profit.
The IJN had learnt their lesson not to tangle with the Soviets. The British Empire was at death’s door and vulnerable. The resources they needed were there for the taking. The answer of course is in their leadership and the military’s influence on it.
@@stevepirie8130 This reply is off the topic of the video, but your statement that Japan could have continued the war in China without bringing in the US is wrong. Because of the war in China, the US had slapped crippling sanctions/embargos on Japan, most notably steel and oil. At the time of the Pearl Harbor attack, Japan had calculated that they had 6 months before the shortages became severe. The choice to continue the conquest of China meant that Japan needed to end the embargos and the only way they saw to do that was to swiftly defeat the US.
Very true about sanctions, what if the Japanese had taken a different path. By that I mean leave China alone but attack the European colonies only?
The British, Dutch, Portuguese, etc?
The US would have had no reason until that point to apply for sanctions. The Japanese would have plenty oil, rubber, etc. If I was Japan at that point I could say basically I’m protecting my fellow Asians from evil Europeans, etc.
Then if the Germans who at that point in ‘41 were still on the ascendant publicly said to America leave my buddy alone or else,would the President have enough support to go to war just to rescue Euros foreign assets?
It’s astonishing how powerful and effective Japanese forces still were in China as late as 1944, while the Pacific theatre was all but lost to them.
It can seem that way when you're fighting an all but broken army of a very poor country rife with civil war and famine.
It's not very hard to fight an outdated, corrupt, unequipped and undertrained army if you have a modern, well-equipped and properly trained army.
sharadowasdr
See above
@@sctm81 then compare with what the soviets did to japan in Manchuria. the Japanese army was bleeding elite troops by the hundreds of thousands in china starting from day one in 37
Very interesting presentation, thank you.
I wonder how much U.S. Army General Stillwell’s incompetence (actually the Pentagon and Washington DC’s inattention to the problem) and British over-attention with India and it’s ultimately unsuccessful attempts to hold onto her pre-WW2 colonies contributed to the terrible power vacuum within China in 1945. A power vacuum that Mao so readily exploited.
I have been reading the comments and there seems to be some debate as to the meaning of ichigo. According to wiki the original characters for this are 一号作戦. The meaning I get from this is number one, but the feeling behind it is likely it's number one in a series of operations, not that this is number one in importance. So this one would be 一号作戦, then they would launch 二号作戦 and then 三号作戦 (1, 2, 3, etc)
Isn’t it 伊？
Very interesting history, a version with pictures would make it perfect.
I think this would be a perfect example to show a "win the battle, lose the war" scenario. And a good answer to "what if the Wehrmacht won this last-ditch offensive?"
Aside from the fact that we know how the Pacific War went, the Japanese are infamous for the “win a battle, lose a war” scenario. Almost from the beginning of their first offensive operations in the WWII era (as in start of the second Sino-Japanese War), the Japanese Empire displayed a severe short-sightedness and two dimensional thinking. They seemed to almost purely consider the short term tactical effect of their actions, while largely ignoring the long term strategic consequences. They very quickly let themselves get bogged down into a four front war (the four being in China, India/South Pacific, the US, and the “war” between the IJA and IJN).
A very good book on this campaign is The Yellow River Operation by I P Daily.
Great video, I enjoyed it. The other major offensive in WW2 was Operation Forager. 😁
Thank you that was amazing
They couldn't have a force meet them half-way from Vietnam? Hell, I'd sure up that juicy salient in the North and then see if I could take a juicy bite of them in the south provided I could affect some kind of build-up at that point in the war - no clue what Japanese shipping looked like but I have to assume a good portion of it was busy supplying of the bottom of the ocean by this point.
Fuzzy Dunlop certainly was suffering.
26:12 about the Soviet advisor saying Mao is pleased of the nationalists defeat, do you have the source of this story? Seem very interesting
There is Mao's talk with the Japanese prime minister after the war where the Prime minister apologized and Mao said... no need, you guys did us communists a solid.
Ichigo (different pronunciation) also means strawberry. That would have been a cool (and unusual) name for a Japanese offensive.
Well done, thank you.
Fascinating video! Please more about the Wars in Asia. Dai-Nippon Banzai!
Why am I so early? It is a really weird feeling when you actually experience being this early on a popular channel...
Has Justin written any books about this stuff? He does his homework and really like the videos that use him as a reference for ww2 in the pacific and it is refreshing to hear an updated perspective instead of the usual US-centric narrative. If he doesn't have any books, he should. Better yet he should make audiobooks of them cus I could listen to him talk about this stuff for hours.
He has a masters in history, that means he has a thesis lying around somewhere
Why does the map say Mongolia where Manchuria/Manchukuo is? Lol
Yeah, the map really isn't great. I wanted to use one from Hans van de Ven's book that is way better, but that may have been a copyright/usage issue so we had to settle for the crappy wiki map.
@Marry Christmas but northeast china has NEVER been called and has never been considered part of mongolia in china(and in japan),as chinese i can assure u that. So calling it mongolia is hilariously wrong.
It was in conjunction with Operation U-Go in which the Japanese invaded India to sever the air bridge from British India to China.
I will be doing a chat specifically on Burma sometime down the line. I have only just started reading up on all the sources and I want to do it justice before I put something out there.
Please do a video regarding the Soviet invasion of Manchuria, Southern Sakhalin, and the Kuril Islands. Finding good English sources on that part of the war has been very difficult.
It is certainly in the cards! I have to read the handful of stuff that is available first.
Interesting. Ichigo also means strawberrie. but that has no bearing on this topic. just a bit funny remark.
I have heard of this operation. It was a desperate attempt to finish ONE war (1: vs Chiang’s Nationalist Army, 2: vs Britain’s 14th Imperial Army led by General William Slim and 3a: United States General Douglas MacArthur and 3b: United States Admiral Chester Nimitz) allowing the Japanese to confront the remaining two opponents one at a time. As successful as Operation “ICHIGO” was however, Chiang would NOT give up or surrender. He just rounded up more conscripts and kept fighting.
And then, 3 months after ending war in Europe, Soviet Union declared war to Japan and liberated Manchuria and North Korea in less then 2 weeks. That operation demonstrated Deep Operation at it's best and was highly influential in Cold War military thought.
The Soviet invasion of Manchuria and the northern islands of Japan in 1945 was largely supplied by the USA, including most of the fuel via the route to Vladivostok, the vast majority of Soviet ships were American supplied for this purpose alone, and as for the The booming success of the armored divisions of the Red Army, the Japanese simply did not expect a Soviet attack and had made no preparations for that eventuality, and did not have a real air force in Manchuria.
It helped that the Japanese started surrendering once the Emperor decreed it so. Otherwise the Soviets would have had a significantly tougher time.
The Soviets declared war on Japan on August 8th. The atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on Aug 6 and on Nagasaki on Aug 9.
@@DouglasMoran Yes, but agreement was made already in Teheran 1943 to solve Europe first and Soviet Union will join fight against Japan 3 months later. Piling of material started already in 1943.
@@SeismicHammer Operation took in account that Japan is lacking in tanks so it was planned as one large sweep against Quantung Army at full strength. By August '45 lot of Japanese forces were pulled and sent to other battlefields making operation easier.
Congratulations on a thought provoking lecture on geo politics, relevant in our time.
I believe the Second Sino-Japanese War is about where the war on the Eastern Front was in the 50s; largely unknown and/or ignored by the west. As it was every bit as brutal and important, I'm hoping it's rediscovery and investigation is in the near future. Reading about the objectives of Operation Ichigo, it seems little more than a plan of desperation and almost certain failure (for even that time) on a scale that makes the Battle of the Bulge look like a military exercise.
Wow, I never heard of this operation!