By Eric Wu, bostonese.com
Yangtze River and Yellow River are the two longest and most famous rivers in China. They also played vital roles in China’s War of Resistance during WWII. The 1938 Yellow River Flood was created by the Nationalist Government in central China in an attempt to halt the rapid advance of Japanese forces. An estimated 800,000 people in Henan, Anhui, and Jiangsu provinces were drowned. The strategy worked to some degree, and Japanese troops, whose initial plan was to occupy the whole China in three months, were forced to move slowly along the Yangtze River from east to west toward Chongqing, the wartime capital of free China.
In the mid-August 1940, General Chen Cheng deployed five army groups in the sixth war zone, which consisted of 400 thousand troops, to Enshi in Hubei Province, guarding the entrance on the east of Chongqing. Subsequent to the falling of Nanjing and Wuhan, the Japanese Army kept concentrating its main force to break into the China’s wartime capital. In Hunan and Hubei Provinces, which were located on the way to Chongqing, flames of the war had never been put out. The Chinese Army in the sixth war zone had to defend against not only the Japanese Army that was moving to the west, but also another group of Japanese intruders who attempted to break into Sichuan Province along the Yangtze River.
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