Battle of Taierzhuang

By spring 1938 the Japanese army had taken Shanghai and Nanjing and expected the walled town of Taierzhuang, astride the Grand Canal, to be a formality on the way to linking its northern and central fronts. Li Zongren fed provincial divisions into the town and let them be surrounded there, fighting house to house for two weeks while other Chinese armies closed in behind the attackers. When the encirclement shut, the Japanese force had to cut its way out and left much of its equipment behind. It was the first major Chinese victory of the war, and it mattered less for the ground held, which was given up within months, than for the demonstration that the Japanese army could be beaten. The town itself was left in ruins.

Casualty figures for Taierzhuang are among the most contested in the war, with Chinese wartime communiques, Japanese unit records and Western estimates differing by close to an order of magnitude, and the wartime propaganda value of the victory is part of why. The battle's memory has been political twice over: it was a Nationalist victory, which made it awkward in the People's Republic for decades, and its rehabilitation from the 1980s onward tracks the broader PRC reappraisal of the Nationalist war effort, of which the memorial park and the reconstructed town are the physical result. Li Zongren's own memoir, dictated in American exile, is a principal source and an interested one. Historians also use Taierzhuang to argue about whether the Japanese defeat was a Chinese operational success or the consequence of two Japanese divisions advancing without coordination.