With regards to the fighting against the Japanese by both the Communists and Nationalists in China, who did most of the fighting and dying? I’ve read arguments that the Nationalists actually did most of the fighting and it took a heavy toll on the number of soldiers and morale once the Chinese Civil War had restarted-the CCP was in a better condition than the nationalists. On the other hand, there are claims that the Communists actually fought the Japanese on a greater scale than the Nationalists had, thus pinning more support behind the CCP once the Japanese surrender and the civil war resumed. I’m curious as to what generally historians agree or think on this topic. Thank you and have a great day.
I should note that there are considerable disagreements between Western scholarly writing and some Chinese writing on the effectiveness of KMT and CCP forces during the Sino-Japanese war and civil war.
The Chinese government does not permit challenges to certain aspects of the official history of the war, and critical accounts may be suppressed. Scholarship which acknowledged the contributions of KMT forces during the Second Sino-Japanese war appeared for the first time only during the 1980s, and the scope of discussion expanded again in the early 2000s. Xi Jinping’s recent consolidation has reversed this more open historical dialogue to some extent.
Similar self-censorship also still occurs in Japanese scholarship, mostly concerning Japanese atrocities during the war.
For several decades, American scholarship of the war was similarly constrained by domestic political considerations. The ‘Loss of China’ to communism, and the role of alleged communist in shaping US policy towards China, became major features of Senator McCarthy’s anti-communist crusade. Criticizing particular wartime officials (such as Gen Joseph Stilwell) became “Academic taboo,” as did deviating from the view that Chiang Kai-shek was a corrupt incompetent.
Who bore the brunt of the fighting
The concise answer is that the nationalists did the overwhelming bulk of the fighting and dying.
Nationalist casualties numbered more than three million (there are estimates as high as ten million but I think the lower numbers are more credible). Estimates of Communist military casualties are between 450,000 and 600,000. This disparity was due to the greater size of KMT forces as well as the CCP usually avoiding conventional battle in favor of guerilla warfare.
A more pedantic answer is that Chinese civilians bore the brunt of the dying. Tens of millions of people died from combat, reprisals, famine, and atrocities during the war. The overwhelming majority of these victims were civilians.
At the outbreak of the Second Sino-Japanese war, the armed forces of China were as follows:
In 1937 CCP forces were comparatively small, and the nationalists were fragmented. Some estimates put the actual fighting strength of the CCP at only 40,000 troops in 1937. Despite subsequent CCP growth and considerable nationalist consolidation, both statements remained somewhat true in 1945. Troops sometimes included in nationalist tallies were in fact provincial/warlord armies which collaborated with the Japanese during the war, or remained outside effective nationalist control for the duration of the war.
Although fragmented, KMT forces were much more numerous than CCP troops for the duration of the war, and tended to do more direct fighting with the Japanese. During the war, nationalist forces launched many traditional large-scale military campaigns, inflicting considerable casualties on the Japanese, but usually suffering casualties at a rate five or ten times higher than the Japanese. These efforts nonetheless forced Japan to retain far more troops in China than initially planned and to reduce their own offensive operations. Japanese forces suffered around 200,000 killed and 300,000 wounded by late 1941, when they attacked the US and various European colonies. Japanese and collaborationist forces had suffered an estimated 3 million casualties within China by the end of the war.
CCP forces generally avoided major offensive operations, focusing on small-scale ambush, sabotage, and the execution of collaborators. CCP forces underperformed other Chinese forces in early campaigns, such as fighting in the central Yangtze valley in 1938. CCP forces were similarly outclassed by KMT troops in the internecine fighting of the ‘New Fourth Army Incident’ (January 1941) suffering 7,000-10,000 casualties while the Nationalists suffered only a few hundred. One of the few major offensive periods for the CCP, the “Hundred Regiments Offensive” (August-December 1940) is claimed to have inflicted some 25,000 Japanese casualties at a cost of 100,000 CCP troops. This provoked a severe anti-insurgent campaign by Japanese forces, which reduced the communist base areas in half.
CCP forces began to grow again in late 1943, before rapidly expanding to more than a million in the final year of the war. But the communists remained protected to an extent by a secret Japanese-Soviet agreement to leave the CCP in control of three provinces.
It is broadly true that all three factions (Japanese, Nationalists, Communists) scaled back their operations after Japan expanded the war in late 1941. The Japanese largely focused on mopping up guerillas, the Nationalists tried to hold their ground and aid the campaign in Burma, and the communists gathered strength and conducted Guerilla war. The Ichigo offensive of 1944 was the major exception to this general rule.
A CCP defector alleges that it was Mao's stated policy to direct 70% of effort to expanding CCP base areas, 20% to fighting the KMT, and 10% to fighting the Japanese. This statement may be anti-communist propaganda, but there is evidence for this view. The view of some Soviet attaches in Yan'an was even more critical of the CCP.
This period saw both CCP and KMT commanders making agreements not to fight with the Japanese, though these agreements were specific to certain areas. The KMT also had as many as 400,000 troops used exclusively for containing the CCP throughout the war, rather than fighting the Japanese.
But on the whole, the bulk of Japanese offensive efforts during the war were directed at the KMT and areas under nationalist control. This was seen dramatically in the Japanese Ichigo offensive of 1944, in which 500,000 of the 650,000 Japanese troops within China were directed in a massive campaign against the KMT. Ichigo inflicted 150,000-600,000 KMT casualties, left Sichuan as the only large province under Nationalist control, and dealt a severe blow to KMT credibility within China and among crucial allies such as the US.
continued in pt 2