Chapter 15: Analysis of the 2nd Sino-Japanese War from July 2, 1937 to August 17, 1938
While victory was mostly obtained, the war was not yet over. Xibei San Ma ("The Three Ma's") was still resisting, and it was very likely that the other Chinese factions would attempt to grab land for themselves and fill in the power vacuum in the western portion of China. However, the outer areas of China stood no real chance now that Chiang's government has collapsed, and their defeat was inevitable.
The causes of China's defeat were many and varied. The NRA suffered from a serious deficiency in heavy artillery and aircraft. The IJA was able to attack NRA positions well before the NRA was able to return fire. This allowed Japanese infantry to close on NRA defenses under the cover of artillery and bombs, reducing casualties. The NRA's weapons were mostly obsolete, and only Chiang's German-trained divisions carried equipment that performed as well as their Japanese counterparts. The NRA was also poorly led, and their tactics were very simplistic. While IJA soldiers were trained to operate in poor environments in a semi-independent manner, NRA soldiers lacked the training to operate independently and relied on mass assaults to gain ground. As a result of the NRA's poor tactics, training, and leadership, the NRA was never able to go on the offensive.
A Chinese "Big Sword" close assault unit. These troops were equipped with swords, grenades, and a pistol and were used in large numbers to defend cities and fortifications.
Their main role was supposed to be that of a stormtrooper, but the situation never allowed them to be used on the offensive.
However, despite China's deficiencies, the IJA did not perform as expected. The IJA was a modern, well trained and equipped army, yet at the start of the war was too small to make significant progress against China's vast armies. Until early 1938, the IJA's southern army lacked the manpower to fully exploit the situation on the ground, and it was the addition of a new Homengun (corps) that pushed China over the edge. Also, despite being trained to operate in bad terrain, China's mountainous interior posed serious challenges. The IJA also performed very poorly when crossing rivers, and the majority of casualties came from river crossings. What was expected to be a 6 month war turned into a 13 month war. In the end, the current structure of the IJA was deemed adequate and sufficient for future operations in either Siberia or Southeast Asia, but improvements to the IJA's ability to cross rivers were deemed to be a mandatory requirement to any future wars.
Japanese tanks moving through an occupied village
Below are a series of graphics illustrating the state of Japan's armed forces and military-industrial complex:
Japan's current military production1
A summary of Japan's and Manchukuo's armed forces2
An overview of Japan's infantry equipment
An overview of Japan's armored equipment
An overview of Japan's small warship equipment
An overview of Japan's large warship equipment3
An overview of Japan's heavy aircraft equipment
An overview of Japan's small aircraft equipment
An overview of Japan's industrial equipment
An overview of Japan's theoretical knowledge
An overview of Japan's infantry and armor training
An overview of Japan's operational army doctrines
An overview of Japan's naval training and doctrines
An overview of Japan's pilot training and doctrines
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Author's notes
There are a lot of cool pictures from the historical war online. If you're interested, here's a thread with pictures from the
Japanese side and another from the
Chinese side. I want to point out those links go to a forum outside of this one that Paradox has no control over, so if you don't feel comfortable visiting the Axis History Forum then don't click the links.
1) What you can't see are 2 more convoys. Supplies are eating up most of my IC, but after I create China-Nanjing I'll free up about 30 IC for production. I'll end up using the freed IC to build more IC.
2) The IJA is structured into 2 army groups consisting of two armies each. Each army contains 2 corps of 5 infantry divisions (3xINF+1xSUP), an armored infantry division (2xINF+2xIST), an independent division (2xINF+1xENG+1xSUP), and an armored cavalry division (2xL-Arm+1xMOT+1xT-SUP or M-SUP). The remaining cavalry are part of the Korea Army, and the rest are garrisons. The marines are 2xMAR divisions attached to an SNLF corps. A 2xPAR division will join the SNLF later.
3) In the version of the mod I'm using, there was a bug with capital ship tech dates. This has since been fixed.
One thing I'd like to talk about here is the use of the AI to fight the ground war for me. I mentioned it earlier, but the AI is smarter than people give it credit, but it only shines when you know how to use it. I very well could have won this war a year earlier had I taken manual control of the army, but I find handing over the grunt work to be more realistic, more challenging, and more fun for myself and you guys. I also don't have the patience to micromanage a front line of this scale. Now, having said that, I would never let the AI near my navy and don't trust its invasion timing, hence my house rules on me manually controlling the navy and special forces. I want to have direct control over over the very expensive navy and when to conduct invasions. Overall I'm happy with how the AI performed. Was it perfect? No. Was it competent? I'd say yes.
So, the trick to using the AI to manage your armies is to create a new theater for them, and adjust the theater boundaries as the front advances in order to "steer" the AI-controlled army group to where you want it to go. In this case, I had two theaters at the start, and attached the northern army group to the Dalian/Korea theater and attached the southern group to the Tokyo theater. This kept both army groups focused on their objectives and prevented them from overlapping their troop deployments. I find this to be the key, because had I not used two theaters here then the AI would've sent most of the southern army group's units to the north. That would've been bad, because the entire purpose of the northern AG was to act as a lure so the southern AG could advance quickly with minimal resistance. If I hadn't used the second theater, then the plan would've been ruined and I'd still be fighting far away from Changsha right now.
The second key, in my opinion, is to NOT use theater-level AI control. The theater-level has the advantage of being able to "see" all fronts other than the active one, but that is also a disadvantage because the theater AI will garrison places I don't want it to. Like the Mongolian border. The theater AI also has a very bad habit of using front-line troops to garrison cities far from the front. Now, while it makes sense to protect important areas, it should either use garrisons or non-front line units to do that. I don't want my tank divisions sitting in Taiyuan when I need it near Xi'an. If you give the theater AI some garrison divisions then it'll park them in the right spots, but as you can see I couldn't afford to build that many garrisons.
So, at this point in the game the AI is doing pretty good. Not as well as I or you guys would do, but better than you might expect.
