Battle of West Hunan

Overview

The Battle of West Hunan, also known as the Battle of Xuefeng Mountains and the Zhijiang Campaign, was the Japanese invasion of west Hunan and the subsequent Allied counterattack that occurred between 6 April and 7 June 1945, during the last months of the Second Sino-Japanese War. Japanese strategic aims for this campaign were to seize Chinese airfields and secure railroads in West Hunan, and to achieve a decisive victory that their depleted land forces needed.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.

Significance

The Battle of West Hunan, fought between April and June 1945, was among the final major Japanese offensive operations of the Second Sino-Japanese War. With Japanese land forces already depleted, the campaign's strategic aims were to seize Chinese airfields and secure railroads in West Hunan, objectives that reflected Japan's deteriorating capacity to sustain its broader war effort. A decisive victory was deemed necessary to offset mounting Japanese losses elsewhere. The engagement pitted approximately 110,000 Chinese Nationalist troops under senior commanders including He Yingqin and Wang Yaowu against roughly 80,000 Japanese forces under Yasuji Okamura. The disparity in recorded casualties — over 21,000 on the Chinese side against approximately 1,181 Japanese — indicates the cost of the Allied counterattack phase, though the campaign unfolded in the closing months before Japan's surrender. Occurring in the same period as the Allied advances in the Pacific, the battle represented one of the last instances of large-scale Japanese offensive action on the Chinese mainland.

Forces & casualties

Commanders (7)