The Beiping–Hankou Railway Operation (Japanese: 京漢線作戦; Mid August – Dec. 1937) was a follow-up to the Battle of Beiping–Tianjin of the Japanese army in North China at the beginning of the 2nd Sino-Japanese War, fought simultaneously with Tianjin–Pukou Railway Operation. The attack was not authorized by the Imperial General Headquarters. The Japanese advanced to the south along the Beiping–Hankou Railway until the Yellow River, capturing Linfen along the way. After the Imperial General Headquarters wrestled control over troops from local commanders, the majority of participating Japanese units were transferred to participate in the concurrent Battle of Taiyuan. These units were replaced by newly formed 108th and 109th divisions.
Operations
In September after securing Beijing and its surrounding area the Japanese army moved south in 2 armies. Their main objective was to secure the major cities and the railway lines connecting them.
Battle of Baoding
Japanese forces approached Baoding, which boasted a sixty-foot wall, two successive moats, and considerable amounts of barbed wire. If properly defended, the city could have held for weeks. Instead, it fell in a single day. The Japanese, as was to become commonplace, committed atrocities within the city after its fall. Acts of rape and murder were committed at the medical college of the city, which was burned, with many of its faculty thrown into the blazing fires.
The Japanese First Army recorded the battles of Zhuozhou and Baoding as a bloody and hard-fought one with losses at its highest of all battles in the Beiping-Hankou Railway Operation. The First Army suffered over 4,000 casualties while claiming enemy losses at 26,000.
Battle of Cheng'an and the Cheng'an Massacre
After the Marco Polo Bridge Incident, county magistrate Li Xizhang conscripted all able-bodied young men in Cheng'an county and organized his staff and police and local militias in the event of a Japanese assault, gathering over 8,000 guns. On October 17, the defenders were bolstered with Yao Zishou's battalion of the former 29th Army, a cavalry company of the 53rd Army, and some Chahar police officers. In the early morning of October 24, a Japanese unit attacked the northern wall of the county but was met with fierce machine gun fire from the defending soldiers and civilians. As the Japanese soldiers were thrown into chaos, Chinese soldiers, militia troops, and civilians descended from the walls and engaged the enemy in close combat. In the end, the Chinese claimed that, except for twenty to thirty Japanese soldiers who managed to escape, five hundred Japanese soldiers were killed.
After the battle, all the militia units withdrew from the county with the captured weapons and ammunition. That evening, more Japanese troops arrived and began bombarding the west gate. At that moment, the Kuomintang troops also retreated without organizing an evacuation. With the other gates already sealed off, except for some who were able to scale the walls and escaped, most of the civilians especially the women, elderly, and the children were left at the mercy of the Japanese Army. By the time the Japanese troops left the county to pursue the retreating Chinese Army, a large portion of the county population, less than 5,000 before the battle, had been massacred, with many being rounded up and machine-gunned in large-scale executions and atrocities, assaults, and murders committed against the women and children.
According to divisional commander Motojirō Taniguchi's situation report in February 1940, the Japanese 108th Division suffered 150 killed and 150 wounded at Cheng'an on October 24, 1937 while claiming 100 abandoned enemy corpses.
Aftermath
After the stalemate at Yellow River from December 1937 to March 1938, the fighting resumed resulting in Battle of Xuzhou.