Why were Chinese GMD armies so ineffective in the 1937-38 phase of the war and beyond?

What was going on here? Much more than a quick survey of the battle results would indicate. Let us take a look at three important questions: 1) why did the Chinese armies perform so poorly?; 2) why didn't Jiang press to negotiate a peace treaty after such devastating losses during the first few months of the war? and 3) what problems did these early victories, and the war in general, cause for Japan?

Chinese ground forces vastly outnumbered those of Japan--at least on paper. But these forces were consistently ineffective, with the exception of the CCP irregular forces. The average Chinese soldier was poorly equipped and poorly trained compared with his Japanese counterpart. Furthermore, China's air force was small, and had largely been destroyed during the first few weeks of fighting. Japan, by contrast had substantial air power located in China, which it used very effectively. But these facts are only one part of a much larger picture. One key factor is that the GMD military forces, except for a small elite that Jiang never used in battle--had little or no morale for fighting a serious war.

The root of China's military weakness was Jiang and his pursuit of what I like to call a "balance of weakness." Recall that Jiang's position as China's ruler was precarious owing to the presence of numerous semi-independent powerful groups such as warlords and their armies, *organized crime syndicates,* and the CCP, which remained strong despite Jiang's repeatedly having tried to *crush it* since 1926. Jiang generally enjoyed the support of China's wealthy elite and of the major organized crime organizations. This support was not based on ideology or any other strong bond. It was based mainly on their seeing Jiang as the person best able to further their interests. Likewise, Jiang enjoyed the nominal support of the major warlords provided that he grant them substantial autonomy and that Jiang remained powerful enough that individual warlords did not see it as being in their best interest to break with or rebel against Jiang. Jiang's basic policies did not change from the 1920s through the 1940s. His goal was to retain and enhance his personal power, to which everything else was subordinate (incidentally, the same could be said for Mao Zedong, CCP leader and Jiang's main domestic enemy). He pursued war with Japan only when popular demands grew so large that Jiang risked alienating his major supporters by not taking a stand. Once he took a stand, he had no choice but to fight on (for reasons we will see below). But Jiang, seems to have known all along that his ultimate battle for power would be fought against other Chinese, not Japan.

So Jiang's basic strategy was to keep all potential challengers to his power weaker than himself. One way that he did so was by encouraging potential rivals to distrust each other. Japan's invasion was in many ways a boon for Jiang, because his position in the GMD was strengthened by it. He became, in other words, the only one with enough power to lead China through the crisis. Throughout the war, Jiang made sure that the situation stayed this way.

The major way of obtaining soldiers for the GMD armies was by *kidnapping young men* from rural villages. Such "recruits" were typically sent to areas of China far from their homes, where they would be unfamiliar with the local geography, and, in many cases, would not even speak the language of the local area (there was no de facto common language throughout all of China at the time). There, these recruits would endure brutal, but generally ineffective "training," while living in wretched conditions. Death was a common fate, even in the absence of any combat. Such soldiers had no real loyalty to the GMD. Insofar as they fought, it was simply to save themselves. Not all GMD army unites were staffed this way, but many were. Jiang usually kept his elite soldiers back in reserve and to send armies comprised of forcibly conscripted peasants out in the field to face the enemy.

Jiang carefully balanced the commanders of his armies so that, whenever possible, commanders who distrusted or hated each other would be placed next to each other. GMD commanders often devoted more effort to watching other GMD commanders, not Japanese armies. Indeed, during many of Japan's advances, GMD armies fought bitterly--against each other--to determine which would get to retreat first. Such military forces, although large in number, were nearly useless during serious fighting. Toward the end of the war, Japanese commanders had figured out that simply hiring local peasants to move toward the Chinese lines while holding aloft the Japanese battle flag was often sufficient to spark a panicked retreat.

Not only were these Chinese armies ineffective in opposing Japanese advances, they were often just as brutal to local civilians as were Japanese soldiers. With good reason, local civilians feared GMD and Japanese soldiers about equally. In the remote northwest of China, however, where the CCP established its base of operations, the situation was different. The CCP made an effort to cultivate peasant goodwill, and this effort paid of during the war years as well as during the subsequent civil war in China that lasted roughly from 1947-1949. The CCP armies were effective against the Japanese enemy. They were reasonably well led and consisted of volunteers. It might also be useful to reflect briefly on the Korean War, ca. 1950. China's army then was just as poorly equipped as it had been a decade earlier, and Chinese military leadership was not innovative in any way. The U.S. commander, MacArthur, was contemptuous of Chinese forces amassing at the border of North Korea, and he ignored them--until they attacked and sent the (mainly) U.S. forces into full-scale retreat. The point here is that, even in their poorly equipped state, Chinese armies were capable of fighting effectively. In 1950 the Chinese typical soldier believed in the cause for which he was fighting; in 1940 the typical Chinese soldier did not.

Jiang's government more resembled an organized crime syndicate than a government in the usual sense of the term. Whenever possible, Jiang used the war against Japan to profit materially and monetarily, dolling out the proceeds to those GMD elites Jiang calculated would most benefit his long-term attempt to control China. When the United States got into the war at the end of 1941, Jiang and his cronies began gorging themselves on everything the U.S. could provide. Prices that U.S. soldiers and organizations had to pay for Chinese goods (trucks, supplies, even admission to brothels) increased several hundred percent overnight. Most of the supplies intended to support troops in the field never arrived. It is no wonder that Jiang's armies performed so poorly under these circumstances. Indeed, it is amazing that they held together at all. (There is a superb but little-known book that is particularly insightful about these and related issues concerning the war in China: Graham Peck, Two Kinds of Time [Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1967].)

Why did not Jiang try to work out a deal with Japan after nearly all of east China's cities fell to the invaders? The typical explanation was that Jiang was simply determined to fight on for idealistic reasons, but such a thing would have been entirely out of character for him. Jiang had no choice but to fight on because early in the war the Japanese government formally declared that there would be no deal. In other words, nothing short of total surrender by Jiang would have been acceptable. Having made such an unambiguous declaration, Japan's government was unable to back down. This rigidity was not only a problem for Jiang, it became a problem for Japan. And it ultimately led to a broadening of the war by Japan's attacking the United States.

Take a look at *this map* and notice that, of the Chinese territory conquered by Japan during the war, the vast majority of it was in Japanese hands by the end of 1937. After that time, Japanese gains were relatively minimal. Why? There were several reasons. First and most important was logistics. One characteristic of Japan's armed forces at the time was that they were heavily weighted at the front end. Specifically, for approximately every 9 or 10 soldiers fighting on the front line in the infantry, there was one solder behind the lines providing support (e.g., supplies, communications, medical services, etc.). This ratio meant that Japanese armies tended to strike with much greater power than their overall size would indicate as possible, but, on the other hand, they lacked the staying power to carryon on a protracted war. China turned into such a war and became a logistical nightmare for Japanese which were only partially mechanized.

In addition to a severe weakness in its logistics operations, Japanese forces in China faced the constant threat of guerilla attacks. These attacks often came from the CCP armies, but Chinese organizations of various kinds resisted the Japanese presence. Even though the typical GMD soldier in the field had no particular loyalty to the GMD, China had become a nation during the twentieth century (a nation without a strong state). In other words, especially in the cities, but even to some extent in the countryside, ordinary people began self-consciously to think of themselves as Chinese. This national consciousness provided the basic sentiment for opposing Japanese conquest. So wherever Japanese were in China, they faced varying degrees of hostility, which put further *pressure on supply lines* and other aspects of supporting a vast army (well over a million strong) in a vast land area (China is approximately the size of the continental United States). By late 1938, China had turned into a logistical quagmire for Japanese armies, with no immediate prospects for a solution. At this point, many Japanese leaders would undoubtedly have wanted to conclude a diplomatic settlement, but, for the same reason that Jiang had to persist in the fight, so, too, did Japan.