| “Original caption: “When entering a town, shots are often fired from behind and with the greatest caution Japanese soldiers penetrate a Chinese village.” With the failure to annihilate the main Chinese armies at Xuzhou, Imperial General Headquarters discarded the chimera of a single “decisive battle” in China in favor of staking out the dominance of vital strategic centers. Tokyo selected Wuhan as the key target for the new strategy. Wuhan served Nationalist China as the civilian government center and military hub for the armies guarding the Central Yangtze Region. Moreover, Wuhan figured symbolically as a rallying point for Chinese resistance in 1938. In late May, the Japanese cabinet approved a plan to seize Wuhan and to attack Guangzhou (Canton) simultaneously. They would then establish “a new government opposed to war, opposed to Chiang Kai-shek (October 31, 1887 – April 5, 1975), and opposed to Communism.” They expected that the vast tertriory the Chinese had already lost, followed by the loss of Wuhan and Guangzhou, would end the war and give them control of China. Chiang met the renewed Japanese drive on Wuhan with a colossal and desperate measure. From Xuzhou, Japanese troops marched west along the Long-Hai rail line. By June 6, 1938, they threatened to cross the Yellow River and attack at Zhengzhou on the Beijing-Hankou rail line. From Zhengzhou, their route south to Wuhan would be logistically secure and bereft of natural obstacles. Chiang flew to Zhengzhou at the end of May and made 1 of his most fateful decisions of the war. The Chinese refer to the Yellow River as simply “The River.” Its middle reaches and its tributary, the Wei, gave birth to Chinese civilization. Massive dykes with rock and rubble core and earthen embankments contain the river in its middle and lower reaches, where the riverbed often flows above the adjacent land. Epic catastrophic floods on the Yellow River, usually caused by a combination of natural forces and government negligence, punctuate Chinese history and evoked a 2nd name for the river: “China’s Sorrow.” Maintaining the dykes formed a virtually sacred task of all Chinese central governments. Under the traditional “mandate of heaven” theory that undergirded imperial rule, a flood signified the loss of mandate. The dyke system profoundly molded the very core of historic Chinese political arrangements, for the obligation to maintain dykes to preserve the mandate led to “an obsession with control, and an authoritarian system of government which ensured that control.” With the defeat of Li Zongren’s (August 13, 1890 – January 30, 1969) 5th War Zone at Xuzhou, total defeat by Japan loomed terrifyingly before senior Chinese leaders. No battle-worthy Chinese force remained to impede the Japanese thrust along the Long-Hai rail line to Zhengzhou. At a minimum, the Chinese desperately needed time for Li’s forces to reassemble and to at least permit the central government to displace to the west, with its administrative infrastructure and much of its surviving munitions industry now ensconced in Wuhan. Chinese leaders also feared the prospect of more Nanjings, large and small. In this fraught atmosphere, Qian Cheng (March 31, 1882 – April 5, 1968), commander of the 1st War Zone encompassing the middle reaches of the Yellow River, and Cheng Chen (January 4, 1898 – March 5, 1965), minister of war, proposed to Chiang breaching the dykes to cut the Long-Hai rail line. None of Chiang’s principal subordinates uttered any objection and Chiang made the final decision himself to use yi shui dai bing (“water as a substitute for soldiers”). The moment chosen for breaching the dykes fell in early summer, the sole time of year when the river flowed high and fast. At other seasons, low and sluggish waters would have precluded a huge flood. But this moment also fell at the most critical time of the year for farmers, as they were least apt to flee with their crops verging on harvest. A breach was opened in Henan province on June 9, roughly 30 miles from the Japanese vanguard. Manual labor initiated the rupture; the river did the rest. About 3/4 of the main current surged out from its normal northeast course to the southwest, sluicing across a flat plain. The flood cut the Long-Hai Railroad just south of the breach. Heeding no human design, the torrents inundated enormous stretches of productive agricultural land in Henan, Anhui, and Jiangsu provinces before dividing into 3 watery talons that punched to the sea. The unbounded deluge inflicted a calamity of almost unimaginable proportions. In 1948, the Chinese government reconstructed figures for the dead and their proportion to the population in the 40 counties affected. These imply that individuals near the original breach gained some forewarning and priceless opportunity to seek safety. The waters typically took those further distant unawares, with no time for flight on the plains graded perfectly level by several millennia of repeated flooding. Of those who did not drown immediately, thousands died of hunger or disease in the weeks that followed. The flood also inflicted a titanic environmental disaster. The people were dead or expelled—likewise the livestock. Houses, roads, bridges, and other public structures were demolished. Often only the angular lines formed by the tops of the walls of county towns protruded above the surface of the flooded expanse. The inundation not only destroyed the standing crops, it also erased centuries of irrigation canal networks and coated the earth with silt that ruined the soil for cultivation. Much of the region west of Xuzhou became void of living presence. Later figures for fatalities and refugees widely differ, although there is no dispute they were stupendous. Official Nationalist government figures assembled in 1948 looked as follows: Casualties of the Yellow River Flood, June 1938 PROVINCE HENAN ANHUI JIANGSU TOTALS Deaths 325,589 407,514 160,200 893,303 Refugees 1,172,639 2,536,315 202,400 3,911,354 As horrifying as these numbers are, the actual figures may have been still higher. Although initially the Communist government employed lesser numbers, it reverted to the Nationalists’ approximate 1948 figures in the 1970s to 1990s. An official history in 1994 set the dead at 900,000 and the destitute and homeless at nearly 10,000,000. More recent academic work from archival materials included a 1995 Taiwan study that fixed the deaths at 400,000 – 500,000, the number of refugees at 3,000,000, and the number of people affected at 5,000,000. A subsequent study put the number of dead and homeless at 500,000 each. The Nationalist government at 1st tried to blame the breach falsely on Japanese bombs. The Japanese vigorously denounced this claim and countercharged that the incident had killed 300,000 peasants and demonstrated the “ruthless contempt for human life” of Chiang’s government. The Communists, largely mute at 1st, adopted the same theme — that the incident confirmed the inhumanity of the Nationalist government. But the evidence favors the conclusion that it was not sheer callousness, but confusion and panic at the highest echelons that drove Chiang’s decision. Chiang never mentioned the event in his diary, nor did he express remorse. Those caught in the path of the flood tended to blame both sides. During the rest of the war and into the civil war that followed, swaths of the flooded area became stalwart base areas for Communist guerrillas. What effect did this immense sacrifice purchase? The Japanese reoriented their main approach for their own reasons toward Wuhan from what had shaped up as a north-to-south thrust from Zhengzhou to an east-to-west advance up both banks of the Yangtze. There, however, the Chinese 9th War Zone mounted protracted resistance. A 2nd thrust southwest across country from Xuzhou faced much more difficult terrain. The delayed advance proved to have very important strategic effects. But the price of using the Yellow River for the 1st time in Chinese history against an invader would be to raise a profound question about the mandate of the Nationalist government. As there was virtually no media coverage of this horror at the time, it has rested in obscurity ever since. The final telling word on the Yellow River flood of 1938 is provided by the Western historian who has done the most to preserve the memory outside China, Diana Lary (born 1941): “We are left to make an almost impossible leap in imagination to understand the suffering on such a vast scale, and to grasp the horror of it. The written accounts do not help us. Most of them simply list figures, with very little descriptive detail, no names of the victims, no personal stories, to underline the magnitude of the suffering. It is inconceivable that this would be the treatment of so vast a tragedy…in the history of World War II in Europe.” | |
| Image Filename | wwii1806.jpg |
| Image Size | 137.70 KB |
| Image Dimensions | 1024 x 714 |
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| Caption Author | Written or Adapted by Jason McDonald |
| Date Photographed | July 22, 1938 |
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| State or Province | Anhui |
| Country | China |
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| Status | Caption ©2026 MFA Productions LLC Please Do Not Duplicate or Distribute Without Permission; Image in the Public Domain |
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