Viewing The Wuhan Battle From Japanese Battle History Series Books And Force History

This study focuses on the details of the Wuhan Battle in Sino-Japanese War mainly through historical documents from Japan.The contents mainly included:First, by quoting from the war history books of Institude for Defense of Japan Defense Agency and the force histories that mentions the Wuhan Battle. The study described the Japanese side of the Wuhan Battle, the operational plans to deploy. Second, the Japanese force divided their Shina troops into Yangtze-River north shore force, Yangtze-River south shore force, the Second Army and fleet in Shina total four parts and this paper gives a detailed description of the operational plans of these forces. Third, this paper investigated the situation of the Chinese air forces air struck Taiwan, Kyushu, especially the Huansheng Xu air force air raided the Japanese mainland. Fourth, this paper discusses the Japanese side in air combat of the Wuhan Battle. Fifth, it investigated the changes of the Sino-Japanese War after the Japanese occupation of Wuhan.Feb.16th,1938, though the base promoted a policy not to expand the area of the war, the active ground combat forces expanded the war into Xuzhou and Wuhan, etc. Towards Japanese side, the main purpose laid not in defeating Chinese army, but in occupation of crucial points in central China and through this strategy giving the Chiang Kai-shek regime a fatal blow and make it surrender, then end up the Sino-Japanese War.Aug.22nd, the Japanese army headed to Wuhan rapidly since the base issued a command to attack Wuhan. Some newspapers published the situations of the Sixth division and other units in the Wuhan battle. Oct27th, the Sixth division occupied Wuhan completely. However, at the same time continuously fighting in the foothills of Mount Lushan,101th division and106th division suffered heavy losses by the onslaught of the Chinese army.Due to the positive coverage of the media and military writers which are called "Pen Forces", the Wuhan Battle of the case to some extent, penetrated into Japan. But after the Wuhan Battle, the ability of Japanese military mobilization gradually reached its limit and that make promoting the further war more difficult. All in all the Wuhan Battle become a turning point of the Japan. The strategy transferred from defeating Chinese army and occupation to make Chinese government surrender into long-term, protracted battle. The Wuhan Battle didn’t bring Japanese any good, but the war consumed the spare capacity of the Japanese side, and elongated front meaninglessly.Now whether it is in China or in Japan, the research on the perspective of Japanese is relatively rare. Also on the Japanese side, most researches are based only on "war books" authored by Defense institute for war history, JDA. And that is insufficient. In this situation this paper investigated the literature works about the Wuhan Battle from staff officer, military writers, etc, and the memoirs of diplomats, journalists, etc. On this foundation it shows the trend of Japanese side in the Wuhan Battle. And all these make this paper unique.