Last time we spoke about the road to the second battle of Changsha. After becoming commander of the Eleventh Army in early 1941, Anami studied detailed battle maps and intelligence, then met with General Hata Shunroku, who urged him to destroy the core of Chiang Kai-shek's best troops. At Yueyang, Anami reviewed the existing war game materials left by Okamura but criticized the first Battle of Changsha as failing because attacks were too dispersed and lacked a clearly focused main direction. He therefore designed a radical concentration plan: instead of spreading offensives across Hubei and Jiangxi while attacking Changsha, he would pull forces from southern Hubei and northern Jiangxi and mass them before northern Hunan. Meanwhile, the Chinese commander Xue Yue developed a "lure and annihilate" strategy based on the expectation of repeated Japanese dispersion, an assumption Anami's concentration invalidated, making the Chinese counterattack far harder to execute.

 

#209 The Battle for Dayun Mountain

Welcome to the Fall and Rise of China Podcast, I am your dutiful host Craig Watson. But, before we start I want to also remind you this podcast is only made possible through the efforts of Kings and Generals over at Youtube. Perhaps you want to learn more about the history of Asia? Kings and Generals have an assortment of episodes on history of asia and much more  so go give them a look over on Youtube. So please subscribe to Kings and Generals over at Youtube and to continue helping us produce this content please check out www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals. If you are still hungry for some more history related content, over on my channel, the Pacific War Channel where I cover the history of China and Japan from the 19th century until the end of the Pacific War.

There are places in the geography of war that acquire a significance out of all proportion to their size. Dayun Mountain was one of them. Rising from the north bank of the Changshui River — the upper reaches of the Xinqiang — it commanded more than thirty square kilometres of densely forested, nearly impenetrable terrain. Its summit reached roughly a thousand metres above sea level and appeared to surge more than eight hundred metres above the surrounding lowlands, so sudden and dramatic was its emergence from the valley floor. In winter, snow lay on its heights for months at a stretch, blanketing the forest in silence and making movement even more treacherous than it already was. Its narrow, rugged tracks made wheeled transport all but impossible, confining any fighting to infantry alone. The mountain was, in the most elemental military sense, easy to defend and difficult to attack.

But Dayun Mountain was more than a topographical obstacle. It was an anchor point. From its northeastern approaches, the road through Hengxi led to Yanglousi; from the southeast, the track through Beigang reached Tongcheng; from the northwest, the route through Taolin approached Yueyang. Whoever held the mountain held a hand on the throat of northern Hunan. For Xue Yue, the formidable commander of the Chinese Ninth War Zone — the general the Japanese would come to call "the Little Warlord" and whose tactical instincts they deeply respected — it was a position that could not be surrendered without consequence. He had long since deployed a portion of Ou Zhen's 4th Army to garrison it, keeping a reliable force on the heights to observe and disrupt Japanese movements in the region.

Yang Sen's 27th Army Group had gone further still, using the mountain as a base from which to launch raids into the Japanese rear. Supply convoys had been ambushed. Patrols had been disrupted. The garrison on Dayun Mountain was not merely passive — it was an irritant, a persistent thorn embedded in the Japanese flank. Every Japanese commander in northern Hunan knew it would eventually have to be extracted. The only question — the question that would define the opening phase of the Second Battle of Changsha — was when, and with what purpose.

At dawn on September 7, 1941, Kanda Masatsuka, commanding officer of the Japanese 6th Division, issued the order to attack. His men stood before a mountain draped in dense forest, its contours barely visible in the early morning light. Aircraft came first, followed by mountain artillery, the shells bursting among the rocks and trees where the Chinese defenders had carved their positions. Then the infantry went up — from the east, from the north, from the west — surging against the slopes like a tide breaking against a cliff face.

Far to the rear, three Chinese commanders received the same alarming intelligence almost simultaneously. Ou Zhen, whose 4th Army held the mountain, Yang Sen of the 27th Army Group, and Xue Yue himself all watched their staff officers move the 6th Division's insignia across the operations map — tracing its advance south from Yueyang to the slopes of Dayun Mountain. Each of them was left with the same quietly unsettled question. What, exactly, did Anami Korechika mean by this?

Anami Korechika commanded the Japanese 11th Army, the formation responsible for operations in central China. He was not a man who committed elite formations to secondary objectives. The 6th Division was one of Japan's most experienced and feared units, a formation with a long and brutal history on the Chinese front. Its soldiers had participated in the occupation of Nanking in 1937 and had fought across the Yangtze basin in the years since. To throw such a division against a mountain garrison — however strategically significant — struck the Chinese generals as disproportionate, and therefore suspicious.

Logically, the removal of the Dayun Mountain thorn made sense at any point. Japanese commanders had always known the mountain would have to be neutralised eventually if their lines of communication in northern Hunan were to be properly secured. But why now? And why with the 6th Division specifically? Was this an isolated operation with limited objectives, or was it the opening move of something larger? The Chinese generals watched and waited, withholding judgment, searching the intelligence reports for a pattern.

For two days — September 7 and 8 — the 4th Army's two defending divisions were hammered by the Japanese offensive. The combination of air support, artillery, and the sheer ferocity of the 6th Division's infantry assault overwhelmed the defenders' prepared positions. Repeated counterattacks were beaten back. Bai Huizhang, commanding the 102nd Division, sent urgent telegrams reporting the deteriorating situation. And yet, across the rest of northern Hunan, reconnaissance reported nothing unusual. There was no large-scale Japanese mobilisation visible elsewhere. No armoured columns massing on the plain. No bridging equipment being brought forward across the Xinqiang.

This absence of corroborating activity was itself a puzzle. It could mean that Dayun Mountain truly was the sole Japanese objective — a limited, self-contained operation to clear a nagging irritant. Or it could mean that the broader preparation was being conducted with unusual skill and secrecy, and that what was visible at Dayun Mountain was intended to consume the attention of the Chinese command precisely while that broader preparation proceeded unseen.

Xue Yue, unwilling to surrender such an important position without a fight, chose to probe the Japanese intention. He ordered Yang Sen to commit two additional divisions to the mountain — partly to reinforce the defenders, partly to test the Japanese reaction. If the 6th Division was operating alone, additional pressure might allow the Chinese to recapture the heights. If it was a screen for something larger, the probe would reveal it.

On the evening of September 8, two divisional commanders received their orders. Lu Daoyuan, commanding the New 10th Division of the 58th Army, and Dong Yu, commanding the 60th Division of the 4th Army, were directed to break away from the main defensive line in northern Hunan and advance rapidly toward Dayun Mountain. It was a significant redeployment — two experienced formations pulled from the primary defensive positions and sent marching into the mountains.

The march had barely begun when the situation changed again.

On the afternoon of September 9, while Lu Daoyuan and Dong Yu were still on the road, the 4th Army headquarters began receiving a succession of urgent telegrams from its two divisions on Dayun Mountain. The news was bleak. The Japanese had achieved simultaneous breakthroughs on the eastern and western faces of the mountain, driving wedges through the Chinese defensive lines and threatening to encircle the entire garrison. The positions were no longer tenable. Ou Zhen, assessing the reports, authorised a withdrawal and informed Xue Yue. The mountain had fallen.

Xue Yue ordered Ou Zhen to monitor the 6th Division's movements carefully now that it had secured the heights. The situation was serious but not yet catastrophic. The Chinese forces had retreated in reasonable order. The two divisions now marching under Lu Daoyuan and Dong Yu could still be used to mount a counterattack once they arrived. What happened next — what intelligence arrived that afternoon — would prove to be one of the most consequential misreadings of the entire battle.

Intelligence agents from the 4th Army, bypassing the normal chain of command, wired the Ninth War Zone Command directly. Their report was specific and, on its surface, entirely reasonable: Japanese troops on Dayun Mountain were felling trees in large quantities and constructing defensive fortifications. Xue Yue read this and drew the logical conclusion. The Japanese had taken the mountain and were now digging in — evidently intending to hold it as a permanent position, to eliminate once and for all the threat it posed to their lines of communication. This was consolidation, not preparation for a new offensive. The mountain had value to both sides; now that the Japanese had taken it, they would fortify it, garrison it, and move on.

It was a reasonable deduction. It was also exactly wrong.

What Xue Yue did not know — what no Chinese commander yet knew — was that on the afternoon of September 9, Anami Korechika had received the telegram he had been waiting for. It arrived at his command post in Yueyang from Kanda Masatsuka: The enemy in the Dayun Mountain area has been cleared, and there will be no large number of enemy troops north of the Shagang River. With those words, the opening phase of Anami's plan had succeeded. Immediately, he issued two orders.

The first went to the 40th Division: move quickly and covertly into the positions on Dayun Mountain just vacated by the 6th Division, and maintain the appearance of continued occupation of the area. The 40th was to keep Chinese attention fixed on the mountain, to look like the 6th Division from a distance, to hold Chinese forces in place while the real operation developed elsewhere.

The second order went to the 6th Division itself: reassemble immediately in the area north of the Xinqiang River and prepare to join the main Japanese offensive. The elite formation that had just spent two brutal days seizing Dayun Mountain was to become the cutting edge of the attack on Changsha.

The fortification work Xue Yue's agents had observed — the felling of trees, the construction of positions — had not been the 6th Division digging in for a long winter. It had been the 6th Division preparing positions for its replacement before handing the mountain over to the 40th and slipping away. The intelligence was accurate in every detail and catastrophically misleading in its implication.

The 40th Division was not an elite formation. It had been established in June 1939, as the manpower available on the Japanese home islands grew steadily thinner and the demands of war across China continued to expand. It was poorly equipped by the standards of the Imperial Japanese Army's front-line divisions, undertrained, and had not been tested in sustained offensive fighting. Anami knew precisely what he had in the 40th. He also knew exactly what he needed from it.

He did not need it to fight. He needed it to be seen.

From a distance, in the broken terrain of Dayun Mountain, four or five Chinese divisions could be kept fully committed to the mountain if they believed the 6th Division was still there. All the 40th needed to do was occupy the positions, maintain radio traffic at the expected volume, keep its campfires burning, and patrol just enough to be observed without being engaged in force. The division's most capable unit, the 234th Regiment under Colonel Kiyoshi Shigematsu, was assigned the primary task of replacing the 6th Division's main force — the 13th Regiment — which quietly withdrew and began its march northward.

The Chinese generals, reading their intelligence summaries and watching their staff officers reposition map pins across the operations board, were tracking a ghost.

Xue Yue, persuaded by the intelligence about Japanese fortification work, issued orders for the two approaching divisions — Lu Daoyuan's New 10th and Dong Yu's 60th — together with the two that had already withdrawn from the mountain, to reverse course and counterattack the Japanese forces now believed to be digging in on Dayun Mountain. Four Chinese divisions, representing a substantial portion of the forces available in northern Hunan, were now committed to a battle for a position that the formation they believed to be holding it had already vacated. The trap was not yet closed, but its jaws were open.

The morning of September 10 brought events that no one on either side had entirely planned.

At noon on September 10, Lu Daoyuan was pushing his New 10th Division rapidly forward from west to east, toward Dayun Mountain. The pace was hard but necessary — the 27th Army Group had set a specific arrival time, and Lu Daoyuan was determined to meet it. He ordered his trailing units to close the gaps between regiments and keep moving. The column was threading its way through a valley north of Gantian when the scouts sent back an urgent report.

A Japanese force of approximately three thousand men was approaching from the front. It was now only one and a half kilometres away.

Lu Daoyuan had been in enough battles to know what was happening before the thought could fully form. An encounter battle. The most violent and least predictable form of engagement — two forces, neither prepared, walking into each other in terrain that offered no warning and no margin for error.

The Shigematsu Regiment had received specific assurances from its division chief of staff before setting out. There would be no large numbers of Chinese troops in the area north of the Shagang River. The 6th Division's sweep had been thorough. The route was clear. When the regiment's advance elements suddenly found themselves looking down the barrels of an entire Chinese division, the reaction — across a force accustomed to the methodical rhythms of planned operations — was one of pure shock.

Encounter battles have their own logic. There is no time to form up, no time to bring forward supporting weapons to optimal positions, no time to reconnoitre the ground. The first unit to react, to go to ground and begin firing, gains an immediate and potentially decisive advantage over an enemy still trying to comprehend what has happened. In the valley north of Gantian, on that September afternoon, both sides were equally surprised, and the fighting that erupted was correspondingly savage.

The Yueyang County Annals record what followed in spare, vivid language: Gunfire and artillery fire continued incessantly from noon until night. More than a hundred enemy soldiers were killed, but the National Revolutionary Army also suffered heavy casualties. The following morning, corpses could be seen everywhere — on the mountains, in the paddy fields, along the riverbanks, and on the roads — and the Shagang River ran red with blood.

At ten o'clock that night, follow-up units from the 40th Division arrived and began enveloping the rear of the New 10th Division. Lu Daoyuan ordered an immediate disengagement and redirected his forces toward Dayun Mountain by a different route. He was pressing forward through country that had just shown him two Japanese formations where one was expected. The scale of the Japanese operation was beginning, slowly, to become legible — though its full dimensions remained unclear.

Xue Yue, updated on the encounter battle at Gantian and the confirmation of a second Japanese division in the area, dispatched the New 11th Division as additional reinforcement. The Chinese commitment to the mountain was deepening.

By September 13, the nature of the engagement appeared to have shifted in the Chinese favour. What had begun as a confused encounter battle in a valley had evolved, over three days of movement and fighting, into what looked from the Chinese side like a genuine opportunity. More than three thousand Japanese troops — believed to be the 13th Regiment of the elite 6th Division — had been cornered near Gantian by more than ten thousand Chinese soldiers drawn from five divisions. Xue Yue, a general who understood the rarity of such moments, was in high spirits. He began directing the battle personally, sending a stream of telegrams to his subordinates, driving them to compress the encirclement and destroy the trapped force before it could escape.

The temptation was understandable, even logical. An elite Japanese regiment, isolated in mountain terrain, outnumbered more than three to one, was an extraordinary prize. If it could be annihilated, the blow to Japanese prestige and operational capability would be substantial. Xue Yue had built his reputation in part on his willingness to press attacks when opportunity offered. He pressed now.

What no one in the Chinese command yet understood was that they were not encircling the 13th Regiment of the 6th Division. They were encircling the 234th Regiment of the 40th Division — the decoy formation that had been placed on the mountain precisely to draw Chinese strength in and hold it in place. The ghost had become substantial enough to be grasped, but grasping it served the Japanese plan rather than the Chinese one.

On the 13th and 14th, the five Chinese divisions compressed the Japanese positions into an area of less than ten kilometres, launching repeated fierce assaults. The fighting was brutal, conducted in the mountains and jungle of terrain that rewarded endurance and intimate local knowledge over firepower. On the afternoon of the 14th, soldiers of the 4th Army's 102nd Division drove hard from west to east, the sound of battle rolling across the ridgelines. The Japanese regiment was fragmented and thrown into disorder. Bugle calls sounded from all directions along the Chinese lines; morale surged. Victory appeared close.

The encircled Japanese began fighting their way out along the route by which they had entered, the only corridor not yet fully sealed. And along that corridor, a Chinese ambush was waiting.

Pang Gufeng was a sergeant and deputy squad leader in the 7th Company, 3rd Regiment, 10th Division of the 58th Army. He was not a senior officer, not a man whose name would appear in official histories or command telegrams. He was one of the thousands of soldiers whose individual experiences — of fear, endurance, and sudden violent action — constituted the actual texture of the battle, the reality beneath the operational abstractions.

His company's mission was straightforward in its conception, demanding in its execution. Pang Gufeng recorded it simply: "Our company's mission is to infiltrate behind enemy lines and control a road leading northwest from a high ground, or hilltop. This is the only way for the enemy to retreat." Control it, and the encirclement became a cage.

The march to that position was itself a trial. Pang Gufeng had been ill for two days before it began: "Two days before the mission, I ate spoiled meat and got an upset stomach, vomiting and having diarrhea. Although I was better when we marched that day, I was still very weak. The medic reported to the deputy company commander, who told me to put my gun and backpack on the wagon that the company headquarters used to transport ammunition. I was sweating profusely and had a dry mouth the whole way."

The company set off at noon, moving at full speed. Twice during the march they were caught in the open by Japanese aircraft — strafing runs and bombing that left three men dead and eight wounded. The company commander conferred with the battalion commander and changed to a side road to reduce exposure. Then orders arrived to return to the main road. The calculation was brutally pragmatic: "The side road was shorter but difficult to walk, while the main road was easier but too exposed. 'Better to walk ten miles on flat ground than five miles on mountains,' so to save time, they decided to take the main road."

They reached their position, and the men immediately set to digging. Pang Gufeng, having ridden the supply wagon, felt obliged to work harder than most: "Upon arriving at the location, we heard gunfire and grenade explosions from the east. We quickly dug some simple shelters and trenches. Having taken advantage of not carrying anything during the march, I dared not slack off while working on the fortifications." He noted the common sayings that circulated through the unit: "'A bunker, a shelter, to protect your body,' and 'If you don't want to die young, make sure your fortifications are well-maintained.' These are common sayings circulating in the unit. The words may be rustic, but the truth is real."

Around 2 p.m., the Japanese came. Company Commander Huang Wei had established the signal clearly: the machine guns would open first, and only then would the rifles fire — the whole company committing simultaneously. The company was arrayed so that the Japanese, funnelled toward Xitang, would run into a prepared killing ground. "With our men on both sides and behind the enemy, the enemy could only break through our defenses towards Xitang, only to run right into our guns."

Pang Gufeng had picked out his target early: "The Japanese soldiers charged in from afar, all running, running very fast. I spotted a Japanese machine gunner who was facing me, shirtless, with a white cloth tied around his head, and I listened to the machine gun fire from the company."

"400 meters, 300 meters, 200 meters, 150 meters, 100 meters! My heart was pounding. I could see the enemy machine gunner clearly; he was as strong as an ox, with a body full of hard muscles. I panicked. It felt like that Japanese soldier was staring into my eyes, like he was about to step on my gun barrel if he ran a few more steps!"

The machine gun did not fire. When the order finally came, it came differently than planned: "At this moment, we heard Company Commander Huang's altered voice shout: 'Fight! Fight! Fight! Damn it!' Only later did we learn that the long-range machine gun was broken."

In order to make the whole company hear the order, Huang Wei stood up from his bunker. He did not make it back down: "In order to make the whole company hear the firing order, the company commander stood up from his bunker. After giving the order, before he could lie down, he was hit twice in the neck by enemy machine gun fire and died on the spot."

"Company Commander Huang Wei is from Henan and graduated from the Whampoa Military Academy. He is said to be a good flute player, but I have never heard him play it."

After Huang Wei fell, his deputy took off his own coat and laid it over the company commander's face, had the stretcher bearers carry him from the field, ordered the whole company to remove their hats, and led three calls of "Avenge Company Commander Huang."

"When the company commander's stretcher passed behind me, I saw blood dripping down my clothes. The messenger cried loudly, and I also shed tears."

The fighting continued. The deputy company commander eventually disappeared — it was never established whether he was killed or had fled — before the battle ended. With the machine gun broken and command structures collapsing one by one, men held their positions through individual will. Pang Gufeng recalled what happened when the next assault came:

"When the company commander gave the order to fire, I involuntarily glanced in the direction of his shout, because the original rule was that the machine gun would be the signal. When I turned back to look for the Japanese machine gunner, he was nowhere to be found. I risked peeking out and saw him run to the left. I quickly set up my sights and aimed at him, about to fire, when I saw him fall headfirst, blood immediately staining the white cloth strip on his head. I cursed under my breath, and as I searched for my target again, the enemy had already charged up. We hurriedly threw grenades. The grenades exploded about twenty or thirty meters from the position, scattering dirt and stones across the ground. I saw a dozen or so Japanese soldiers continuing to run forward, and I could hear them shouting; they were only a dozen or so steps away from the position."

Then the grenades seemed to stop mattering: "My mind went blank for a moment. I thought to myself, how come the Japanese aren't afraid of grenades anymore? We've been doing this for so many years, I don't need to hide it from you anymore. Suddenly, I wanted to throw down my gun and run. But at that moment, Dou Rongren, the squad leader of the 6th squad, picked up the machine gun, shouted, and stepped out of the position to fire. Several of the enemy fell down, and the rest ran back. As they ran back, several more were shot down by the brothers."

The honest confession of a professional soldier — not a coward, not a man without courage, but a human being under a level of pressure that strips away everything except the most basic instinct for survival. What held him in place was not ideology or orders. It was the man next to him. "Dou Rongren was the only one in our entire company to achieve merit in this battle. Based on that alone, no one could help but admire him."

The attack broke. A lull settled over the position: "The enemy temporarily retreated to prepare for another attack. The gunfire subsided, and the stretcher bearers walked continuously behind me. I dared not look back."

Darkness brought fresh disaster: "It got dark very quickly. That day was overcast, and once it got dark, we couldn't see anything. The enemy bypassed our company and the 9th Company's two high points and charged directly onto the main road. I also... I'm lost! Isn't this just suicide? The main road is completely blocked by machine guns, but the enemy is still charging in, probably trying to take advantage of the darkness? In the flash of a mortar explosion, I saw the road littered with corpses, the enemy running, crawling, and rolling over their comrades' bodies. My gun was truly 'firing blindly in the night,' firing in the direction of the Japanese soldiers anyway!"

The enemy had breached the line to either side. The company's position was now flanked. No orders came: "The enemy occupied the small hill that our company was defending, and fired several signal flares, some red and some green, I remember. The enemy in front surged towards that spot like a tide. The loss of our company shook the entire defensive line, and the 8th and 9th companies next to us also withdrew. The enemy moved in that direction, and our friendly forces fired in that direction as well. I crouched in the friendly forces' trench, my mind in turmoil."

"Where is Deputy Company Commander Liu? If he's been killed or wounded, the platoon leader should be acting in his place. Surely all three platoon leaders are present? According to battlefield discipline, anyone could step forward at this moment, because it concerns the overall victory or defeat. But neither the platoon leader nor the squad leader has come forward. If I weren't so weak from diarrhea, would I dare to shout, 'Follow my orders?' It's not that simple. I don't understand who would bear the responsibility for the loss if this happened. Following your orders means taking responsibility. Everyone knows that losing a position and causing serious consequences means losing your head! That's probably why no one dared to come forward."

Around nine or ten o'clock, an enemy force crept up from behind — troops from the Xitang direction, moving to reinforce those surrounded to the east: "An enemy force actually crept up behind us, around 9 or 10 p.m. Time on the battlefield is unpredictable; sometimes you feel like half a day has passed, but the company commander checks his watch and says it's only been a quarter of an hour; other times, several hours pass in the blink of an eye. The enemy was coming from the Xitang direction to reinforce those surrounded by our troops. Before I could even think of anything, someone on the position shouted: 'Deputy Company Commander Liu! Deputy Company Commander Liu!' The voice sounded like a platoon leader, but there was no response. Just then, machine gun fire erupted from behind us. It was a small hill, and we hadn't even constructed any fortifications towards it. The enemy had advanced to within twenty or thirty meters of our position."

There was one consideration, Pang Gufeng noted with bitter clarity, that no one had thought to address before the mission: "We've been forgetting one thing: our battalions were positioned behind enemy lines to intercept the enemy retreating from Dayun Mountain back to the Yueyang area. Whether or not there would be enemy forces behind us was a matter for the officers to worry about."

It had not been worried about. The consequences were immediate: "Worst of all, no one was there to command us. I realized that calling for Deputy Company Commander Liu earlier was to report this dire situation. Without command and surrounded on both sides, many men began to retreat, or rather, flee. In the darkness, no one could see anyone else. Our platoon was scattered. We ran along the defensive line towards the 2nd Battalion's position, shouting as we ran, afraid they would misunderstand and open fire. The 2nd Battalion, unaware of the situation, also ran. In the darkness, we heard their officers yelling: 'No leaving the position, or you will be court-martialed!'"

Of the men from the 7th Company who had set out that noon — at full strength, moving at full speed — only a fraction survived to the end. Pang Gufeng recorded the final accounting flatly: "Saying the battle was over was really just a matter of most of the surrounded enemy escaping. Those of us who were cutting off their retreat, along with the troops in front and on both sides, had no choice but to withdraw. The next day, just as dawn broke, we saw corpses everywhere on the hillsides, roads, and bushes — both enemy and our own men. Of the men from our 7th Company who went to the battalion headquarters to be taken in, only 12 remained, including two platoon leaders and two squad leaders."

While the fighting around the ambush positions ground on through the night, the strategic reality of what Anami Korechika had accomplished was becoming, gradually, visible to the Chinese command — though it was not yet fully understood.

The key fact was the timeline. The 6th Division, which had fought for two days to seize Dayun Mountain, had handed the position to the 40th Division on the evening of September 9 and had been marching northward ever since. By the time Lu Daoyuan's New 10th Division ran into the Shigematsu Regiment on September 10, the 6th Division was no longer on the mountain. By the time Xue Yue was directing his five divisions to encircle what he believed was the 6th Division's 13th Regiment near Gantian on September 13, the real 13th Regiment was already north of the Xinqiang River, taking up its designated position in the main Japanese attack formation. The Second Battle of Changsha was, by then, already beginning to unfold along its primary axis — and the five Chinese divisions that might have been part of the defensive line were tied up in the mountains, chasing a decoy.

This was the operational genius of Anami's plan, and it deserves to be understood clearly. The commitment of the 6th Division to Dayun Mountain was not a secondary operation that happened to coincide with the main offensive. It was the indispensable prerequisite for the main offensive. By taking the mountain with an elite division, Anami created the preconditions for Chinese attention to remain fixed on that location. By replacing the 6th Division with the 40th — quietly, at night, maintaining the external appearance of continued occupation — he ensured that the attention would stay fixed long after the elite formation had moved on. And by allowing Chinese intelligence to observe "fortification work" during the changeover, he gave Xue Yue a plausible explanation for Japanese behaviour that was, in every particular, misleading.

It was deception layered upon deception: the initial attack itself, as a cover for the main offensive preparation; the quiet replacement of one division with another, as a cover for the 6th Division's redeployment; and the fortification activity, as a cover for the handover. Each layer reinforced the last. At every point where a Chinese commander might have drawn the correct conclusion, a carefully arranged fact or report pushed him toward the wrong one.

The cost of this deception was paid in the blood of the Shigematsu Regiment. The 234th Regiment of the 40th Division was never intended to fight a sustained battle. It was a screen, a scarecrow given flesh and made to march. When it unexpectedly walked into Lu Daoyuan's New 10th Division on September 10, and when Xue Yue subsequently committed five divisions to its encirclement, the regiment was placed in exactly the position its commanders had hoped to avoid. It fought — hard, and with the desperate intensity of men who understand they have been put in an impossible situation — but the casualties on both sides in those days of fighting around Gantian were severe.

By September 17, the battle in the Dayun Mountain area had settled into a stalemate along the line of Gangkou, Gantian, and Babaishi. The Chinese had not destroyed the encircled Japanese force. The Japanese had not broken out cleanly. Both sides held ground, and both sides had paid heavily for it. The encounter battle of September 10 alone had left the Shagang River running red and the fields and roadsides around Gantian littered with the dead of two armies.

Yang Sen, surveying the situation with the clear eye of a commander who had watched the battle consume resources he could not replace, sent his assessment to Xue Yue. The time had come to close the Battle of Dayun Mountain. He recommended leaving the 102nd Division in the area to monitor and harass the Japanese, and marching the remaining four divisions south of the Xinqiang River before midnight on September 18 to reinforce the frontal defences. The true battle — the assault on Changsha — could no longer be ignored.

I would like to take this time to remind you all that this podcast is only made possible through the efforts of Kings and Generals over at Youtube. Please go subscribe to Kings and Generals over at Youtube and to continue helping us produce this content please check out www.patreon.com/kingsandgenerals. If you are still hungry after that, give my personal channel a look over at The Pacific War Channel at Youtube, it would mean a lot to me.

By September 13th, Chinese forces seemed to have a breakthrough: ten thousand troops cornered a Japanese regiment at Gantian, and Xue Yue urged an encirclement and destruction. Chinese assaults compressed the pocket, yet Japanese fighters broke out through an escape corridor and hit an ambush guarding the retreat road. As night fell, flanking attacks and command confusion unraveled the perimeter. By Sept. 17 the Dayun Mountain fighting stalemated; both sides were depleted, and China shifted back to the battle for Changsha.