China floods Yellow River to defend from Japan

1938 Yellow River flood
In June 1938, Chinese Nationalist armies under the command of Chiang Kai-shek breached the Yellow River’s dikes at Huayuankou in Henan province in a desperate attempt to block a Japanese military advance.For the next nine years, the Yellow River’s waters spread southeast into the Huai River system via its tributaries, inundating vast quantities of land in Henan, Anhui, and Jiangsu provinces. Perhaps the single most environmentally damaging act of warfare in world history, the strategic interdiction threw long-established water control infrastructure into disarray, leading to floods that persisted until the Yellow River was finally returned to its previous course in 1947. Between 1938 and 1947, this disaster killed more than 800,000 people in Henan, Anhui, and Jiangsu and displaced nearly four million.

RATIONALE
After Chinese and Japanese armies had clashed at Marco Polo Bridge in July 1937, the Japanese military launched a full-scale offensive into the heart of China, seizing Nationalist China’s capital of Nanjing in December 1937. The Japanese then set their sights on Wuhan, where the Nationalist regime had relocated.

In early 1938, the Japanese army launched assaults from the Jin-Pu railway’s northern end at Tianjin and from its southern terminus near Nanjing. After meeting at the rail junction of Xuzhou, the Japanese planned to move west toward Zhengzhou in Henan, the junction of the east–west Long-Hai and the north–south Ping-Han railways, advancing south along the Ping-Han railway toward Wuhan. The Japanese army anticipated little resistance in the Xuzhou campaign, but to their surprise Chinese armies held out for nearly five months. When they took Xuzhou in late May, the Japanese moved to bring the war to a decisive conclusion, striking west along the Long-Hai railway in order to press south along the Ping-Han railway and attack Wuhan.

IMMEDIATE CONSEQUENCES
The river’s turbid waters, not yet swollen by yearly summer rains, moved slowly at first. But floodwaters rolled steadily out of the dike opening and advanced southeast, cutting off the Japanese army’s path. Only people living in the immediate vicinity received any sort of warning from the Chinese authorities. Yet the flat, alluvial plain of eastern Henan was densely covered with farm villages and fields. The Japanese advance came in the early summer rainy season, when the river’s floodwaters were at their highest. Over the next few days, the river rose and weakened defenses at Zhaokou as well. From this point, the Yellow River flowed southeast across Henan’s flat eastern plain. As rains fell and the river cascaded onward, its waters spread across the landscape.

LONGER-TERM CONSEQUENCES
Any immediate strategic benefits gained from the Nationalist gambit of turning the Yellow River into a weapon came at a tremendous price. Once diverted, the river flowed unimpeded across eastern Henan’s landscape, which had a generally higher elevation in the north than in the south, it left the channel it had followed since 1855 and took a new course. No topographical divisions prevented the river from moving southeast to join the Huai River. Advancing at a steady rate of around 16 kilometers per day, floods spread into narrow, shallow beds of rivers and streams that flowed toward the Huai. Floodwaters filled these waterways and broke their embankments, causing them to overflow and inundate fields to the east and west.

In early July 1938 the floodwaters entered the headwaters of the Huai River, turning northeast to cut across the Jin-Pu railway before pouring into Hongze Lake. The lake overflowed and waters burst into Jiangsu, flowing in three streams toward the Pacific Ocean. Nature’s rhythms heightened the catastrophe, as high levels of summer precipitation increased the flooding’s severity. Especially heavy rains fell throughout June and July. Waters surged as a result.

RESPONSIBILITY
Like the numerous scorched-earth tactics that the Nationalists employed during the Sino-Japanese War, the breaking of the Yellow River dikes was undertaken in an atmosphere of high-level desperation and panic that grew from the Japanese war of terror. On the other hand, the Nationalist regime showed a willingness to sacrifice people along with resources to keep them out of Japanese hands. The breaking of the Yellow River dikes was the prime example of this tendency. In the eyes of Nationalist leaders, not unlike other modern regimes of the twentieth-century world, “saving the nation” could justify unlimited sacrifice on the part of the civilian population.

Throughout the war, the Nationalist government refused to take responsibility for the disasters caused by the Yellow River’s intentional diversion. Instead, the Nationalists claimed that Japanese bombing of the dikes had caused the floods, presenting the disaster as another example of Japanese atrocities against Chinese civilians. Chinese newspaper reports published in the summer of 1938 followed the official version of events. The Japanese denied these accusations, framing the flood as proof of China’s disregard for human life. When the disaster’s true causes eventually came to light after 1945, the Nationalist regime changed the narrative and presented the flood as evidence of sacrifices made by China’s people to save the nation during the War of Resistance.