The Polish Campaign: Results and German Lessons Learned

Germany conquered its half of Poland in 36 days. It took almost 700,000 prisoners and inflicted over 100,000 casualties in killed, wounded and missing on the Poles. The vast quantity of captured military equipment and ammunition(e.g. over 3000 artillery pieces and 16,500 machine guns), while not suitable for use by the Wehrmacht, could be used to help equip Germany’s minor allies later in the war. By contrast German personnel losses were relatively light – a total of 40,000 including 8,000 dead. Among the 22.5 million Poles in the German occupied territory were 750,000 ethnic Germans and some ethnic minorities prepared to work against the Soviet Union e.g. Ukrainians. However, the overwhelming bulk of the population was hostile and would require an occupation force.

German equipment losses were serious and illustrated the enormous strain of building and maintaining the equipment necessary for mechanized warfare. The Germans lost over 200 tanks and over 400 aircraft. More extensive still were the deferred maintenance issues and outright mechanical breakdowns associated with the demands of combat, poor roads and maintenance and repair resources that lagged far behind the rapid advance of the mechanized ground forces and aircraft operating off of improvised airfields near the front. Many German units were virtually immobile by the end of the campaign.These issues would increase with longer campaigns and tougher opposition.

As was their custom, the Germans reviewed their operations for possible improvements with an intelligent and critical eye worthy of a better cause. They certainly had reason to be satisfied. Their armored forces had overcome earlier operational issues under combat conditions and restored the war of movement the Germans had always preferred to fight, removing the threat of world war I style trench deadlock. German artillery was highly effective. The Luftwaffe had gained air superiority and successfully attacked Polish strong points, troop movements and supply columns on a large scale.

On a more detailed level however the Germans found room for improvement. Tank and motorized units were employed conservatively and cautiously by later standards. Advocates of more aggressive armored tactics were able to build on lessons learned in Poland for later campaigns including France and Russia. The lighter German tanks were found to be useful only for reconnaissance if at all. In the future production of the heavier types would be emphasized even at the expense of the total number of tanks in a division. The mg 34 machine gun was found to be vulnerable to jamming under eastern European conditions. Research was accelerated resulting in the faster development of the more reliable and faster firing mg 42.

The Germans found that their light divisions were, well, too light for sustained combat operations. They were upgraded to Panzer divisions. On the other end of the spectrum, the motorized divisions were too hard to maneuver and control with three motorized infantry regiments. They were each reduced by one such regiment.

There were additional small improvements in battlefield communications and infantry equipment. The Germans also took note of the effective use by the Poles of night attacks and guerrilla activity in rear areas. They stressed night attacks and the combat capabilities of supply column personnel in improved training methods. One area where they learned little was camouflage discipline against air attack. That would come later as the Germans faced increasingly effective air opposition.

Much of the information from this essay is drawn from “The German Campaign in Poland (1939)” the book length Department of the Army Pamphlet No. 20-255 by Robert M. Kennedy which despite being published in 1956 remains a valuable source on the campaign and is packed with the kind of detail on numbers, organization, equipment and order of battle that gladdens a war game designer’s heart.

You can read it online here .

Massive German Bombing Raid on Warsaw

On September 24th, 1939 the German Luftwaffe (air force) conducted a massive bombing raid on Warsaw. A common figure given for this raid is an attack by 1,150 bombers. I was skeptical because the first source that gave that figure also gave the Germans only 850 bombers for the entire campaign. The book “Men of the Luftwaffe” by Samuel W. Mitcham Jr. (Presidio, 1988) confirms the 1,150 figure and gives the Germans barely enough bombers to mass that many in an attack if you count Stuka dive bombers and planes assigned to the western front with France. It helpfully adds that the “bombers” included 30 Ju-52 transports carrying 2 pound incendiaries that were literally shoveled out the door by two men in each plane equipped with potato shovels. In part because of the smoke from the resulting fires, german ground troops were killed by stray bombs provoking an argument between army and air force that had to be settled by Hitler himself. Hitler said keep on bombing as before.

In “The Luftwaffe War Diaries” ( Doubleday, 1968) Cajus Bekker states that the Germans made 1,176 bombing sorties (one flight by one aircraft). He also gives the date for the attack as September 25th and gives it credit for the subsequent surrender of Warsaw. I am inclined to believe Bekker on the sorties (the Stuka’s e.g. could easily have attacked multiple times in the same day) but not on the date or the raid’s impact. So this was probably not the first “thousand bomber raid” nor a raid that decisively broke an enemy’s resistance. Warsaw had been bombed and shelled for days as well as subjected to ground attacks. Food, ammunition and even drinkable water were in increasingly short supply. There is no doubt that this and other bombing attacks contributed to the end of Polish resistance but Bekker is hogging all the credit for the Luftwaffe and possibly distorting the chronology to bolster his case.

The European Balance of Power 1938-1939

In American political rhetoric, the two great “lessons” of world war II are Munich and Pearl Harbor. Pearl Harbor is of course about vigilance and guarding against surprise and treachery. Munich is about standing up to “aggression”, bullies really, and as such may be the more visceral lesson of the two. Popular wisdom has it that if you stand up to bullies they are exposed as cowards and weaklings whereas if you give in they are emboldened and become more aggressive. This particular morality play aside, should Britain and France have stood up to Hitler in 1938? The stakes among nations in a situation such as Munich are very high and governments have always made some kind of effort to, ostensibly at least, substitute rational analysis for folk wisdom and emotion when making such high stakes decisions.

In offering an answer to this question, I will begin by setting some parameters based on what we know of the history. In considering the problem yourself you are free to accept or reject these parameters and adjust your own answer accordingly. First I assume Poland would not be drawn into any conflict; they were quite passive during the actual events. Second, the Soviet Union would stay out of it because lacking a common border with Czechoslovakia they would have had to pass troops through Poland. Poland would not have allowed this and the Soviets were not willing to go to war with both Poland and Germany. For an alternative theory on the Soviets read on till near the end. Third, Italy would have stayed out, just as they did when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939 and for the same reason – they considered themselves (quite justifiably) not ready for war with major European powers at the time. Accordingly, any resulting war is between Germany on the one hand and Britain, France and Czechoslovakia on the other.

Germany at the time had three operational panzer (armored) divisions each with over 500 tanks. On the other hand they had only a scattering of tanks bigger than the Panzer II with its 20 mm gun. The Czechs had a superior tank (the T-38) but in smaller quantities (four battalions assigned one each to four mixed cavalry/motorized divisions). The Czech frontier was heavily fortified but the Czechs had little time to extend the fortifications to cover the new common border with Germany created by the Anschluss. All major sources agree that Czechoslovakia would have fallen to the Germans in six weeks or less. The Germans would have had numerical superiority in infantry, artillery and armor. They would have had air superiority. They also would have had superior (albeit far from perfected) doctrine which would have made the most of both their numerical superiority and their superior capacity for mobile combined arms operations.

What then, of Britain and France? Britain, which in 1940 could only muster a little more than ten divisions on the continent of Europe would have had only two in 1938 and as such was a non-factor on the ground in the short run. France did little in 1939 to try and take pressure off the Poles through offensive action. There was no reason to expect them to be more aggressive in 1938. Even though German forces guarding the German western front would have been substantially weaker in 1938, this would not have energized the French committed as they were comitted to a defensive doctrine and enmeshed in a pessimistic strategic outlook.

Still, when Germany faced west it would have faced a situation in many ways worse than it faced in 1940. Germany’s rearmament program would have been inadequate to both sustain the offensive against Czechoslovakia and adequately arm the mobilizing German reserve forces that would provide the bulk of the infantry masses necessary to successfully attack the French in the west. Moreover while Germany had 10 panzer divisions in 1940 with operational quantities of Panzer III’s and the still heavier Panzer IV, they would have had only 3-6 panzer divisions in 1938. (Germany was adding panzer divisions constantly during this time albeit in some cases by reducing the number of tanks per division and cannibalizing motorized infantry divisions for their men and equipment -especially trucks.)   Thus it is possible or even likely that Germany, even with local air superiority, would have lacked the critical mass to wage successful “blitzkrieg” against the French. If so, the Allies were clearly mistaken not to have defied Hitler in 1938 even if such defiance meant war which it certainly would have.

So what were the allies thinking? First, their rearmament programs were just hitting full stride. Any analysis was haunted by a long list of unfilled ‘requirements’ which needed more time to be satisfied. Second, neither the British or the French had significant numbers of modern monoplane fighters while the Germans already had the Me-109. Finally allied analyses showed a more favorable ratio of forces in the future. (The critical mass of modern forces issue, i.e. quality vs. quantity, was largely lost on them.) By contrast, Hitler’s questions to his generals began with the assumption that the allies would eventually  outstrip the Germans. Accordingly, Hitler wanted to know the optimum time before the outstripping began. Framing the question from this German perspective tended to favor the conclusion that the war should begin now. This was one of the reasons Hitler was frustrated when the allies backed down in 1938 and why Hitler moved quickly against the rest of Czechoslovakia.

On the issue of the modern fighters, it appears that there was a critical mass issue there as well. Assuming German air superiority it is by no means certain that this tactical advantage would have had a decisive on  ground operations. Consider how the effect of air power was diminished in the context of the lower ratio of air to ground forces that was prevalent on the Russian front as the war ground on there particularly during the 1942-43 period. Even less so was the Luftwaffe likely, despite pre-war claims by the advocates of strategic bombing, to be decisive against Britain so long as France held out either indefinitely or long enough for the British Hurricane and Spitfire fighters to come on line. Even in 1940 German bomber forces lacked the weight of bombs to function as a war winning strategic air force.

Thus my verdict is that the allies were better off starting things in 1938. Time would favor the allies and the German capacity to disrupt that march of time would have been much reduced. There remains the question of the willingness of the French and British people to go to war. There is no doubt that both peoples yearned for peace and dreaded war. The impact of world war I was exacerbated by the economic and social effects of the Great Depression. Still, every indicator of public opinion that we have for the time shows repeatedly that a slim but persistent majority of citizens understood the need to resist Fascism and supported war if necessary to do so. Making the case for necessity was a demanding but far from impossible task of political leadership. Sometimes the rational quantitative analysis takes you only so far and the fate of nations must be entrusted to events and the aptly named fortunes of war.

Finally that last word on the Soviets. There is a school of thought that argues that the Soviets wanted to intervene against Germany. It is argued that they mobilized substantial forces and had even arranged for passage of forces through Romania into Czechoslovakia. Reading Stalin’s intent as well as Romania’s and Czechoslovakia’s comfort level with Soviet troops on their territory is a very speculative game. Suffice it to say that If the Soviets were willing to intervene, this would have further increased the balance of forces against Germany. Moreover, it is clear that Stalin’s attitude toward the western allies changed from a desire for a realpolitik based alliance to distrust and contempt as a result of Munich. The result was the Nazi-Soviet pact which will be covered here at the appropriate time.

If you want to delve deeper into my assumptions and conclusions I recommend you consult the following books. On the general history of the period and the case for war in 1938 see “The Change in the European Balance of Power 1938-1939: The Path to Ruin” by Williamson Murray. On the case for waiting for the numbers to change in the allies favor see the relevant chapter in “Dirty Little Secrets of World War II” by James Dunnigan and Albert Nofi. On the case for waiting for the modern fighters see the relevant chapter in “Fighter Tactics and Strategy 1914-1970″ by Edward H. Sims. Finally, for an assessment of British and French politics and public opinion see “The Dark Valley: a Panorama of the 1930s” by Piers Brendon

Seeds of Appeasement – Road to Munich

On September 18, 1938 leading members of the British and French cabinets met to discuss the fate of the Sudetenland a province of Czechoslovakia albeit one with a high percentage of ethnic Germans who had been agitating for their “independence” since April. Hitler began making noises regarding the Sudetenland as early as May of 1938 after consolidating his hold on Austria and there was widespread expectation that this would be his next demand. Hitler made a formal demand for cession of the Sudetenland to Germany on September 1, 1938.

While France initiated a partial mobilization of her army on September 7th, Britain’s Prime Minister, Neville Chamberlain met with Hitler at Hitler’s mountain retreat of Berchtesgaden on September 15th. There he indicated his willingness to work with Hitler to satisfy his demands by proposing a plebescite on the fate of the Sudetenland which, it was tacitly understood, the ethnic Germans there were likely to win. Beyond that, Chamberlain and Hitler agreed to no military action until Chamberlain had the opportunity to raise his possible solution to the crisis with his own government and with the French. Thus the Anglo-French meeting on the 18th.

Telford Taylor in his book “Munich: The Price of Peace” superbly captures the dreary banality of government officials in service of a cause both dishonorable and distasteful. The entire morning was spent with each national contingent trying to get the other to be the first to explicitly propose giving in to Hitler’s demands. Gradually the meeting got around to defining the issue as plebescite or treaty. all of this took so long that it was 10:30 that night before a joint Anglo – French message was sent to the Czech government saying that Czechoslovakia was on its own if it chose to resist ceding the Sudetenland to Germany. Czechoslovakia could of course “ask” for security guarantees for its remaining territory – such guarantees to come from the countries that were selling them out today i.e. Britain, France and of course Germany.

A frequent commenter to this blog has noted the war weariness, aggravated by depression economics, of the victorious western allies of World War I. The resulting desire for peace coupled with an overestimation of Germany’s military power led to the message to Czechoslovakia. More on the results of the message and how events played out soon.

League of Nations Condemns Japanese Use of Poison Gas

On may 14, 1938 the League of Nations issued a resolution condemning the use of poison gas by Japan in its war with China. The gases in question, mustard gas and Lewisite, were used against both Chinese regular troops and guerrillas.

Poison gas seems to have had a particular reputation at this time that caused many people’s capacity for moral outrage to be mobilized against it. You could bomb, burn, shoot and stab all you wanted and while you might be judged on the basis of whom you did this to, you would not be judged as evil per se based on your methods. Use poison gas however and that was evil per se. Franklin Roosevelt, who as president of the United States during World War II authorized or acquiesced in all manner of killing and mayhem was adamant and explicit that the United States would not use poison gas (e.g. at Iwo Jima where it could be argued that the Japanese would be just as dead but would suffer less while American casualties would be much less – no the Japanese had to be bombed, burned, shot and stabbed “by hand” and at great cost in American killed, crippled and wounded.)

As a child growing up in the 1950’s I gradually became aware that, a few pacifists aside, general opinion among the adults around me who had grown up in the the 1930’s was that I could be killed by nuclear blast or radiation and that would be very unfortunate. On the other hand I could take comfort in the fact that many Russian children would suffer the same fate in retaliation. On yet the other hand however, if I was killed by poison gas that would be outrageous and clear evidence of the Soviet capacity for unmitigated evil.

Which is to say that in the 1930’s being condemned for the use of poison gas was a real public relations disaster if what you were hoping for was the good opinion of the American people. The League of Nations condemnation was another victory for China in its battle for American public opinion. It was another step in the establishment of an American view that, after Pearl Harbor, the Japanese were deserving of no mercy in the course America’s pursuit of just retribution and that virtually any means to get there (except, of course, poison gas) was legitimate.

Richard Overy in his book on World War II, Why the Allies Won, has a chapter on the competing claims of the two sides for the moral high ground. I give him credit for including such a chapter although I believe it has a lot of unsupported claims and a lot of discussion that doesn’t lead to useful conclusions. However, I do understand him to make one important point which is that for the United States and Britain to believe that they were fighting a just war made necessary by the evil qualities of their opponents was an important and sustaining motivational factor for two countries that could not employ, ideology, coercion, a sense of aggrieved nationalism or a claim that national survival was at stake to the same extent that their opponents did.

The Condor Legion

The Condor Legion was Nazi Germany’s most notable contribution to Francisco Franco’s Nationalist cause in the Spanish Civil War of 1936-1939. Hitler also contributed weapons, natural resources etc. but the Condor Legion was the only significant military unit sent to Spain by Germany.

I was in high school when I first heard the term “Condor Legion”. It immediately conjured in my mind visions of a large, fierce and formidable air force. It was only later that I learned that a Condor is a vulture, albeit a distinctively large and spectacular  one.

And so it was with the Condor Legion. You might think of it as a decisive force in a campaign to promote fascist ascendancy and solidarity throughout Europe. Not quite. Hermann Goering testified at Nuremberg that Hitler was at first reluctant to commit significant forces to Spain but when Goering pointed out the learning opportunities the Fuehrer brightened at the prospect.

It has also been argued that Hitler was careful to make sure his intervention, quantitatively much less than was provided by Mussolini’s Italy, didn’t end the war too fast i.e. before Italy’s role in aiding Franco thoroughly destroyed any remaining good relations Italy had with Britain and France.

The first German intervention was a small unit of Junkers Ju-52 transport planes which were used to ferry troops and supplies of the Spanish Army of Africa across the Straits of Gibraltar to Spain past the Spanish navy which had by and large remained loyal to the government and was blocking transfer by sea. The Army of Africa was an elite force which possessed most of the recent combat experience in the Spanish army putting down rebellions both major and minor in Spain’s African possessions. It included Moroccans who fought fiercely for the  Nationalists.  (Although they had never flown  before and  suffered extensively from air sickness, the Germans had to post guards to prevent the Moroccans from sneaking onto and overloading the transport planes.) It also included the (at this time almost entirely Spanish and all volunteer) Spanish Foreign Legion whose motto was “Long Live Death” – Francisco Franco was the Legion’s first Deputy Commander at its founding in 1920. These troops were decisive in giving the Nationalist revolt a firm footing in 1936.

Very shortly thereafter the first German volunteers were sent to Spain posing as a tourist group of photographers, engineers and salesmen. Once in Spain this thin pretense was dropped and the volunteers were incorporated into the roles available under the Condor Legion organization which contained five major groupings.

These were (1) the bomber group – initially composed of Ju-52s which were considered suitable as bombers at the time; (2) the transport group – Ju52s in their air transport role ; (3) the fighter group  – Heinkel He51s a fighter design that was considered obsolete well before 1939;  (4) The flak group for antiaircraft defense and (5) a small ground force for airfield security. In keeping with the small German presence the Spanish provided some personnel. For example, the flak personnel were Spanish commanded by Spanish officers under overall German supervision. Aircraft maintenance was provided by Lufthansa civilians already working in Spain.

I won’t do a campaign history here. There are books for that. A good source is a book that I relied on heavily for this mini-essay i.e. Peter Elstob’s “Condor Legion” which is weapons book no. 35 in the Ballantine’s Illustrated History of the Violent Century series.

So what did the German’s learn at Spanish expense and for a relatively small fee in blood and treasure as these things go? First, they needed better planes. After the first encounters with Russia’s agile biplane fighter the Polikarpov I-15 out went the He-51s and the Ju-52’s were consigned exclusively to the transport role. The new German fighter was the very successful Messerschmidt Me-109B (later also the C and E series) and the bombing was taken over by He-111’s and Dornier Do -17’s.

The Germans practiced dive bombing, first with the Henschel Hs 123A and later with their world war II mainstay the Ju-87 Stuka. They practiced aerial bombing of cities, most infamously, thanks to Pablo Picasso, Guernica. More practically and frequently they bombed Madrid and other fiercely defended Spanish towns and cities. It was in Spain that they practiced the sequence of a first wave of attack with 2000 pound bombs aimed at the largest buildings, a second wave with 500 pound bombs to break up the rubble and smaller buildings and make them burn more readily, a third wave with incendiaries and, after an interval to let people come out to fight the fires, a fourth wave armed with anti-personnel fragmentation bombs.

Shortly after the initial formation of the Condor Legion, the Germans added a small but high tech ground force composed of tanks, machine gun units and flak in a ground role. This allowed the Germans to practice the employment of tanks, close air support techniques and the use of flak as an anti-tank weapon. (It always stuns me to recall that the first German General Staff paper on the anti-tank potential of the 88mm anti-aircraft gun was written in 1919.) The Germans also operated in cooperation with Spanish infantry and artillery.

Despite my snarky comments at the beginning of this essay (vultures etc.) the Condor Legion was helpful to the Nationalists all out of proportion to its small numbers. Once the Germans grasped the value of Spain as a learning laboratory for Blitzkrieg, the volunteer system was scrapped and Germany’s most promising military personnel, officers, pilots and others, were assigned to and rotated through the Condor Legion to hone their skills

Another Book Review

Turner Publishing is at it again. They have sent me a review copy of Historic Photos of World War II: Pearl Harbor to Japan. Once again the photos have been selected, captioned and accompanied by text written by Bob Duncan. The Pacific War was a very different experience from the war in Europe. On the ground it was dominated by island fighting and the island fighting  commands a large proportion of the pictures in the book. This suits me well because, as I have mentioned before, my father fought on Iwo Jima and my uncle fought on Guam.

Island fighting was relatively short compared with European land campaigns but was also correspondingly intense.  The well chosen photographs capture that intensity. In discussions at the dinner table my father would tell me stories of marines who, having survived one or two island combats , would become convinced that this next assault landing would be their last. The stories that survived were of course about the marines who didn’t. Frequently such a story accompanied the death of a marine who received the Congressional Medal of Honor or another decoration for bravery posthumously.

So many photos dramatize the island fighting that I came away with a sense that the naval war, the air war, the home front and the weapons and equipment did not get their fair share. This may be unfair as the Pacific Ocean and the pacific war  (there’s an irony for you) were both vast in scope. The war was also uniquely American in a way that the European war was not. Still the previous volume on Europe did a better job of capturing the essence of the American effort there. Although the individual photographs are excellent, the whole is not greater than the sum of the parts. Still, for those like me who have a special interest in the island war the book is more than sufficient when seen as a book primarily on that topic and I would recommend it on that basis.

Once, again I have an argument with Mr. Duncan’s  captions and text. I have been fortunate not to have experienced war to any great degree but I have studied it enough, have enough capacity for empathy and have lived long enough not to be moved in the way intended by triumphalism and nostalgia.  Cliched writing doesn’t help either.

Maybe I am being too harsh. It’s a photography book and the photographs are well chosen and very evocative of an important aspect of World War II – the island fighting in the Pacific. Accepted as such it is a very enjoyable and worthwhile book for those who share that interest.

Now that I have seen this book and the earlier one on Europe, I notice the Turner Publishing “Historic Photos of….” series everywhere. At my local Borders Books I saw that they did a very nice job with local and civil war history in my community of Alexandria, Virginia. The series is a worthwhile one and nicely fills a valuable niche. If historic photography interests you, see what they have at your local bookstore or on their website.

A Book Review

From time to time I intend to do book reviews on these pages. I am a firm believer in the adage that any book you haven’t read is a new book. So some of my reviews may be of earlier published, perhaps out of print (but still available used on the internet) books. Today’s book, however is a new one.

Historic Photos of World War II: North Africa to Germany is a photography book with text and captions by Bob Duncan. The book’s 198 photographs drawn from archival sources begin with the origins of the war in the rise of Nazism and Fascism and move quickly into the American campaigns in North Africa, Italy and Northwest Europe.

Coming as it does at roughly the same time as the Ken Burns documentary and related book might be seen as a disadvantage. However, this book takes pains as the Ken Burns documentary did not to explain with a few well chosen photographs why the war was necessary. Totalitarianism, militarism, the persecution and genocidal murder of the Jews and the subjugation and exploitation of the varied and numerous peoples of Europe are all elegantly and succinctly brought to mind with pictures.
The context having been set, the subsequent photographs of Americans in combat and on campaign are all the more evocative as we now know in a way that only powerful images can show what has set in motion the suffering, destruction and death; and the courage and devotion to duty that come with them.

While a few of the photographs are classic and familiar, most are photographs that I have not seen before. Particularly interesting are the photographs of what comes after the intense moments of combat. One picture that stands out to me is of a small group of 3rd armored division soldiers who have broken out of a local encirclement. Their faces still blackened with the camouflage used in the breakout, their faces are also marked by relief, exhaustion and elation at being free and alive. They are crowded round boxes of food and cigarettes eating, smoking and celebrating their survival.

I could go on as these photographs repay detailed study of what they depict. The home front industries and their workers, interesting weapons and equipment, the modifications and upgrades made to the Sherman tank, various historic personages and much more including scenes of combat are strikingly depicted in a well chosen selection of photographs. I really hate to say anything negative about this very entertaining and informative volume. However, it did strike me that the captions to the photographs, though very informative, occasionally lapsed into the simplistic and the cliched. This usually happened in comments that were not strictly necessary to caption the photograph. A little more editorial attention and restraint might have brought the narrative to a higher level more worthy of the photographic content.

Still, this is a handsomely produced volume and obviously a labor of love for Mr. Duncan who clearly brings a great deal of interest and enthusiasm to his topic. At 39.95 it is not for everyone. However, anyone interested in World War II or war photography and building a personal library on either should not fail to be aware of this volume. The publisher is Turner Publishing and their website is here .

The Nationalist Chinese Army

The Nationalist Chinese Army does not have a good reputation here in America. Perhaps that is because it so completely failed to serve American expectations. Americans expected it to (1) actively take the war to the Japanese by waging war agressively against them and (2) defeat Mao tse Tung’s Communist forces after the war. Ah well, another big batch of American military aid that failed to achieve its objectives.

The Nationalist Chinese Army’s assigned objectives from (ahem) its own government were (1) preserve the nation and its honor by resisting Japanese conquest (2) conserve its strength for the coming civil war with the Communists and (3) win that civil war. It achieved the first two. The third is beyond the scope of this blog.

The army’s major strengths were (1) foreign aid including weapons from a variety of countries and German training – especially for a relatively elite group of 30 divisions in 1937 and a similar group armed and trained by the Americans after 1941 (2) the capacity to produce a material quantity of its own weapons from rifles and machine guns to mortars and field artillery along with the associated ammunition (3) a will to resist based on nationalism and a habit of obedience among the rank and file and (4) the proverbial “inexhaustible” supply of manpower.

I have to note here that this last advantage, much beloved of military historians, comes at a tremendous human cost. Take hundreds of millions of people. Keep them in poverty and ignorance, generally treat them like dirt and start watching them die from the day they are born. Then set in motion the war machinery that actively kills them. Enjoy the military advantages of “an inexhaustible supply of sturdy peasants accustomed to privation.” See the results and pay the price after the war. Makes Mao tse Tung look good by comparison – at least for a while. (Two song lyrics come to mind; “grasp and reach for a leg of hope” (Violent Femmes – “Add It Up”) and “Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.” (The Who – Won’t Get Fooled Again). World history and political science in convenient rock lyric form.

But I digress. The army’s weaknesses were (1) No modern weapons capability i.e. couldn’t make them, couldn’t buy them, couldn’t use or support them. (2) Weak logistics i.e. very little in the way of equipment, supplies or transport. Sustained offensive operations were out of the question. (3) At best uneven institutional strengths i.e. uninspired doctrine, substantial corruption, lack of unity and discipline among the top leadership.

What were the results? The Nationalists fought when they had to and did what they needed to do by their own lights. The best estimate I have seen is that they inflicted over 388,000 deaths on the Japanese. In China, where the Japanese typically did not have to fight to the death and commit suicide to avoid capture, it is reasonable to estimate that the number of Japanese wounded was much larger. it is not unreasonable to estimate that the Japanese total casualties in China reached one million killed, wounded, missing and prisoners. By the time of America’s entry into the war the Japanese had already been convinced that outright conquest of China was, at the least, not practical.

Correspondingly, Chinese casualties were in the millions. The Nationalist army numbered 2.5 million at the start of the war, reached a peak strength of 5.7 million and had 5 million under arms at the time of Japan’s surrender. A total of 14 million men served during the war. Even allowing for the doubtless substantial desertion rate, discharges due to health and age  and the poor record keeping, the math speaks for itself. It was never said of the Nationalist Chinese, as it was of the Italians by their German allies, that their casualties were light because they had run away so fast.

For details on organization and equipment plus some great photographs and a concise account of military operations from 1937-1941 I recommend the book Prelude to Pearl Harbor by Roy M. Stanley . A copy for purchase can be found via Bookfinder or try your local library.