Chapter 299: Steel of The White Sun
From "War, Tyranny, and Liberation"
While the eyes of the world were turned to a war deciding the fate of forty million people in Britain, half a world away, the armies of China clashed viciously to decide the fate of hundreds of millions.
The Southern Coalition had not sought war. They had been caught off guard by the Qing attack on Yunan which had forced the Republicans to act, or risk being surrounded and outnumbered by a further enlarged Qing state. International observers had gauged the conflict as relatively even, the South enjoying a paper advantage in industry and equipment, the North having a larger available force, engorged as it was by its mixture of Imperial militias and paramilitaries aligned with the Yiguandao who had thrown their lot in with the Emperor out of fear of the Japanese, Russians, and Republicans alike.
The war that followed shocked those international observers as the Qing fell on the theoretically better trained and equipped South like a vengeful dragon.
The Long Yun Government in Yunan had always been the weaker of the two Southern co-belligerents, and it had been the target of the Qing offensive that began the war, leaving it in a dire military situation from the moment conflict began. It’s army had been well regarded in the thirties, but its lack of industry and wealth had left it behind compared to the Qing and Republicans. It didn’t help matters that the Yunan military appeared to have been prepared for fighting more akin to previous warlord conflicts, affairs where attacks were not carried through with complete zeal as leaders focused on preserving equipment and resources.
It became clear quickly that this was not to be that sort of war.
Battle casualties leading up to March 1943 totalled approximately half a million in Long Yun’s army. More had been lost to desertion. It was too much for the provincial forces, and collapse became so obvious that much of the Yunan Government fled into KMT territory while in the South, Thai and Japanese forces crossed some kilometres into Yunan’s territory at the request of local authorities to establish a temporary safe zone and ward off the feared Qing irregulars.
Even as Yunan collapsed and the Qing regulars and paramilitaries pushed South, the Republic’s army made grand plans to reverse the tide.
Through desperate economic measures that drained everything from the banking system to the pots and pans in citizens homes, the KMT had put together the funds to bring in foreign equipment on a lavish scale while keeping their domestic industry producing. Foreign governments, perhaps convinced that prolonging the war was in their best interests, seemed willing to allow large scale armament transfers despite the active hostilities. The Qing might align more closely with the Imperial powers in terms of the structure of their government, but the influence of anti-foreigner elements and potential revisionist ambitions of the Qing government seems to have been enough to convince those powers to at least seek to balance the conflict.
Memories of the Boxer rebellions were still live in Western and Japanese thinking, leading to a fear of anti-western paramilitary influences in the Qing realm
The Republic viewed its army as an elite force, struggling against the human mass of Qing aligned paramilitaries and militias. At the same time, it looked overseas to the great victories won by the Russo-Roman army, and decided that emulation of the winning formula would be the best path to victory.
In 1939 there had been perhaps eighty tanks in China.
By the time of the KMT’s grand counter-offensive, there were more than two thousand, many fresh from frontline Imperial service where they were being replaced with more recent models. With the basic assistance from foreign advisors, the KMT had constituted ten tank divisions, organised along Russo-Roman lines. By March 1943, the Republicans were prepared to unleash this new force against the Qing.
The intention was to launch a pincering counter-offensive which would envelop Qing armies and destroy them, following the template established by the Mercury and Venus offensives. The new tank units were husbanded in strategic reserve until the time was right, and then placed on a path directly into the oncoming Qing offensive.
Come mid-April, the word was given, and the tanks ploughed into the advancing Qing forces in a display of mass, concentrated mechanised warfare that would not have been out of place in the opening hours of Mercury.
Deficient in anti-tank guns and with many of the irregulars never having ever seen a tank, let along massed formations of them rolling over hills, firing as they went, many Qing units fell back in disarray or simply shattered.
There were points of resistance, leading to a number of the Clique’s best infantry divisions being savaged in hard fighting against Republican armour while their supporting militia routed, but for the most part, the tanks sliced forwards, sometimes two dozen kilometres a day, scattering all in their path.
The problems began to show in the second week of the offensive. As tank terror began to abate and the armour raced forward, logistical failings began to rear their ugly heads. With supply lines stretched, interdiction or simply organisational failings meant the supply of fuel to the spearheads began to dry up. Tanks had been bought in quantity, but spare parts and fuel were lacking, and the comparatively inexperienced crews struggled to maintain their vehicles under combat conditions. Without sufficient trucks, fuel had to be moved to the front using pack animals, and these were slow and singularly vulnerable to harassment by Qing forces.
The speed of the armoured pincers slackened and then, having regained some sense of the situation, the Qing forces poured into the gaps between the tanks and the trailing Republican infantry.
The tanks, and the offensive, were now cut off, desperate for rescue.
Rescue would be attempted on a lavish scale, three entire KMT armies launching themselves to try and relieve the forward columns that now found themselves fighting a 24/7 battle against their surrounding enemy.
It was a fight that they could only win for so long. While many in the North focused on a few heroic stories of Millenarian zealots or Imperial bannermen destroying tanks with grenades or suicide attacks, the fact was that most Republican tanks were abandoned by their crews when their surrounded, out of supply units could no longer feed the metal beasts fuel, ammunition, or spare parts.
It had taken months of effort and the accumulated wealth of decades to infuse the Republic with one of the largest armoured forces in the world, purchased almost directly from the greatest practitioner or armoured warfare of the time.
It took less than a month for the Qing armies, many armed with traditional weapons or 19th century firearms cast off by colonial powers, to destroy this force in its entirety. Qing forces had lost almost as many men as their enemy, but much less equipment, and they had much more blood to spare.
Losses in materiel were catastrophic for the Republic, even if manpower could be made up given time
For foreign observers, the sudden defeat was met with shock and initial disbelief. Losses were dismissed as propaganda from beijing. How could an alliance of zealots, radicals, warlordists, and Imperial bannermen, armed with obsolete weapons and lead by a government in such tension with itself, lay low a substantial concentration of Russian made armour?
As the truth of the matter did become known, there was some trepidation, especially in Tokyo. The victory over the Republican fleet had filled Japan with confidence, and plans were underway to expand operations against the Americans or build up on the Indian border.
That was no longer possible. If Qing victory might be forthcoming, that would place an enlarged Chinese State in a direct border with Japanese aligned Thailand, the Japanese colonial holdings in China, and all of the Legation cities. That state would also no longer be balanced by internal opponents in Yunan and the Republic. For all their believed qualitative deficiency, the Qing army was, at minimum, the third largest in the world, and with Republican units disintegrating there was another great fear.
The many thousands of vehicles, hundreds of thousands of guns, and tonnes of ammunition and supplies sold to the Republicans now seemed as if they might soon fall into Qing hands. If that was the case, Tokyo feared there might be a risk of qualitative uplift in the Qing forces, perhaps stoking the already sometimes radical anti-foreign ambitions of some of the factions at play.
Experience had shown that Chinese units could perform well when trained and equipped to foreign standards. Many now feared the Qing would have free access to KMT materiel.
The Japanese Government was determined not to risk another Fengtien incident, where outnumbered Japanese troops had been overrun by surprise. The Japanese holdings, and their Thai ally, would need to be extensively reinforced, and a watchful eye kept on China.
Few now had any faith in the ability of the soldiers of the Republic to stem the Qing tide.
In Beijing, spokesmen for the Imperial faction grew increasingly active in engaging with foreign media, sidelining representatives of the clique who remained averse to such interactions.
The message they gave often included a refrain which had become something of a motto in certain circles.
The Empire, long divided, must unite.
The collapsing Republican perimeter as the Japanese and Thai reinforcements arrive to garrison the new border.
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