October 1938: Japan captures Hankou

On 25 October 1938, a Japanese army moving south from Xinyang through the Dabie Mountains captured Hankou, later moving to occupy the rest of the Wuhan cities. This is the culmination of a campaign launched along the Yangtze river valley in June 1938 to capture Hankou, which had been serving as the military headquarters of the Guomindang since the capture of Nanjing in December 1937. The main force advancing along the Yangtze river had been bottled up by Chinese soldiers at Jiujiang around August 1938, so the breakthrough came from a smaller force moving north of the Dabie Mountains, where there was much less Chinese resistance.

By losing control of Hankou and Wuchang, the Chinese also lost control of the last major rail system in China under Guomindang control. After the fall of Hankou, the territory under Guomindang control was almost entirely underdeveloped, with the industry or infrastructure necessary to support a modern war. From this point, the Guomindang were forced to depend almost entirely on outside powers -- mainly the USSR and, after 1941, the USA -- for the supplies necessary for even limited operations against the Japanese. The Wuhan Campaign itself was also extremely costly, resulting in approximately 1 million Chinese military casualties. The remnants of China’s professional officer corps that had survived the Battle of Shanghai was killed during the Wuhan Campaign, leaving the Guomindang dependent upon untrained, and often factitious or disloyal, warlord armies.

The capture of Hankou by the Japanese forced another major retreat, this time to Chongqing, in the Sichuan basin. This marked the new division between Free China and Occupied China, as Chinese control beyond the interior mountain ranges did not return until at least 1944 and Japan never conducted serious operations this far into the interior. China lacked the resources to retake occupied territory and Japan decided to suspend major combat operations in China after the Wuhan Campaign. Japanese leadership felt that, by capturing the major industry, infrastructure, and population centers of China, they had achieved their goals and that an attack on Chongqing would be costly, a particular concern due to the high Japanese casualties during the Wuhan Campaign, without achieving significant gains.