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.Cai Tingkai, who had led the successful Chinese resistance to Japan in Shanghai during the 1932fighting, was never given command again.The legendary military genius Bai Chongxi quarreled with Chiang in the wake of the Northern Expedition and did not serve under the Nationalists again until the summer of 1937.Chiang convinced Bai to become his chief of staff in August, and Bai fought his way to several victories in 1938, but it was too late to resist the Japanese onslaught by then.12 There is no doubt of Japan’s vast advantages over the Chinese in terms of matériel: guns and ammunition, planes, battleships, transport vehicles, and tanks.In 1935, China had only 457 pieces of artillery in its entire army.13Chiang Kai-shek, trained as a military man, served as commander-in-chief and not a field commander.Yet Chiang feared rivals so much that he constantly replaced capable subordinates with mediocre and incompetent syco-phants.As well, Chiang sometimes did interfere with battles when they were in progress, with disastrous results.He was known for countermanding his own staff and telephoning detailed orders directly to commanders – who would thus receive conflicting orders in the midst of battle.Even if Chiang understood military strategy, no one can direct a battle from hundreds of miles away.Finally, the rapid success of the Japanese was also due to the unpreparedness of the Chinese.No plans had been made to ambush Japanese troops as they made use of China’s few north–south railroad lines.Even as Chinese armies retreated south, a few attacks on vulnerable points would have dramatically slowed the Japanese advance.Although individual cities were sometimes defended with great valor, by and large Chinese troops were simply routed.In the north, the Communists launched the “Hundred Regiments Offensive” against Japanese-held forts and railroads in 1940.Under the general command of Peng Dehuai, Communist troops inflicted considerable damage, but the Japanese responded with the even more effective “three-alls” campaign.The main Communist army lost 100,000 men to casualties and desertion; the population in areas under CCP control plummeted from 44 million to 25 million.Yet the Chinese still did not surrender.The stalemate that then ensued was not exactly stable.Chinese cities were systematically bombed in order to shake civilian morale.Chongqing wasThe War of Resistance, 1937–45315bombed 268 times between 1939 and 1941; 4,400 people were killed in the first two days of the campaign in May 1939.Casualties subsided when the Nationalists built underground shelters, and Chinese behind the Japanese lines would radio warnings when Japanese planes took off.Fierce fighting flared on several occasions, then ebbed.Both the Nationalists and the Communists understood that guerrilla actions were an important means of harrying Japanese troops and countering their great advantages in matériel with minimal losses to China.Such harassment never amounted to a significant military threat to Japanese positions, but it made the war more expensive for them.More importantly, it also prevented them from advancing further into the countryside.In 1942, then, the nature of the war changed fundamentally.It is true that little changed on the ground: the stalemate persisted.And for the Allies, the importance of the China theater lay in bleeding Japan rather than in its immediate defeat.But US aid to Chiang Kai-shek soon amounted to $630million in supplies and a $500 million loan.China fulfilled its end of the bargain, preventing a million and a half Japanese soldiers from fighting in Southeast Asia, the South Pacific, and Australia over the next three years.At the same time, US military men in China were disappointed that more was not done to attack the Japanese front lines.What they did not understand was that Chiang needed to disperse Nationalist troops to defend territories from local rivals as well as the Japanese.With the United States in the war, he also wanted to preserve his best troops for the future struggle with the CCP.Chiang’s was a defensive strategy, including an economic blockade against the CCP bases.Japan’s main goal was to conquer Southeast Asia: Hong Kong, Singapore, the Philippines, and Burma, as well as the Western Pacific islands.The Japanese conquest of Burma was completed by June 1942, thus severing Chongqing’s main link with its allies and threatening it from the south
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